Period: Inner worlds

Ford Madox Ford Ford Madox Ford
drawn in Paris, c. 1925
coloured crayon with pencil on paper 41.8 x 32.3 cm
Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Stella Bowen and Ford Madox Ford sold their cottage in Sussex in 1923 and tried in vain to buy a house close to Paris. The money was eventually used to support Ford’s literary journal, the Transatlantic review, which he started in 1924.

Around the time that the journal failed, twelve months later, Ford began an affair with the novelist Jean Rhys. For now Bowen remained by Ford’s side, but this relationship “cut the fundamental tie between himself and me, and it showed me a side of life of which I had no previous knowledge”.