The Good Soldier

For nine years John Dowell and his wife Florence, idle wealthy Americans, keep up the most civilised of friendships with Edward Ashburnham — the “good soldier,” an English gentleman and the model of his class — and his wife Leonora, meeting season after season at the German spa town of Bad Nauheim. Dowell calls it a minuet: the safest, most ordered thing in the world.

It is nothing of the kind. Beneath the good manners runs a long, hidden history of adultery, concealment, and despair, and Dowell — who shared a house and a table with these people for years — saw none of it. The Good Soldier is the slow, circling exposure of everything that was really happening during those placid seasons, told by a narrator who seems to be discovering the truth at the same moment we are, and who cannot always be believed.

First published in 1915, the novel is the supreme English experiment in the unreliable narrator and the “time-shift” — the disordered, looping narration Ford developed in his years of collaboration with Joseph Conrad. It refuses to march in a straight line; it withholds, doubles back, and contradicts itself, forcing the reader to assemble the truth that its bewildered teller cannot. The result is one of the great achievements of literary impressionism and a permanent model for every later novel that distrusts its own narrator.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1915 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s composition and technique, a biographical note on Ford Madox Ford, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.