How The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion drew on A Sentimental Education
A documented line of influence: Ford Madox Ford demonstrably engaged Gustave Flaubert’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
A Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert · 1869
The Age of the NovelThe influenced
The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion
Ford Madox Ford · 1915
ModernRelevance
9/10
On The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion’s page
- The Good Soldier is Flaubert's A Sentimental Education transplanted into English — Ford venerated it above all novels, read it fourteen times, and memorized its passages
- The famous indirect, impressionist narration Ford perfected here is a deliberate emulation of Flaubert's "oblique" method — feeling approached sidelong, never declared
- Reading the source first shows you where Ford got the technique: a tale of passion told by circling it rather than facing it
On A Sentimental Education’s page
- Ford Madox Ford called this the supreme novel — he claimed you had to read A Sentimental Education fourteen times to grasp it, and he could recite whole sections from memory
- He preferred Flaubert's frustrated, sidelong story of passion here to Madame Bovary — and built The Good Soldier in its image
- Flaubert's oblique method, never stating the feeling head-on, became the blueprint for Ford's English impressionism a generation later