SOURCE: "Ford's Modern Romance," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXVI, No. 18, November 22, 1979, pp. 31-2.

A highly respected American literary critic, Kazin is best known for his essay collections The Inmost Leaf (1955) and Contemporaries (1962), and particularly for On Native Grounds (1942), a study of American prose writing since the era of William Dean Howells. In the following review of the first paperback edition of Parade's End, which appeared more than fifty years after the four novels of the tetralogy were originally published, Kazin examines Romantic elements in Parade's End.

Parade's End, Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy, revolves around Christopher Tietjens, "the last British Tory," a Yorkshire gentleman of ancient family and impeccable instincts whose dazzling, promiscuous wife is so enraged by his perfection that she tries for almost nine hundred pages to destroy him. It is a prodigiously fluent and inventive fiction that is no less captivating for...