Some Do Not …

Ford Madox Ford, 1924

Modernist novels The First World War

Christopher Tietjens moves through a world of strained marriage, social judgement and approaching war.

Read the book Contents

Length: 13 chapters
Reading time: About 8 hr 4 min
Words: 115,091

About the book

Two officials travel in a railway carriage whose carefully maintained comforts reflect the order they expect society to preserve. Christopher Tietjens and Vincent Macmaster nevertheless understand that world differently. Behind the confidence of their class lie personal difficulties and competing ideas of duty.

Ford's novel approaches experience through shifting attention and the pressure of remembered events. Marriage and reputation connect private feeling to public judgement, while war enlarges the uncertainty surrounding those connections. The reading interest lies partly in the distance between what a person believes honour requires and what others make of the resulting behaviour.

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Modernist novels The First World War

This edition

Text from Standard Ebooks, who proofread and typeset it and dedicate their edition to the public domain. Ford Madox Ford died more than 70 years ago, so the work is out of copyright in the UK.