SOURCE: "Living as Ritual in Parade's End," in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Spring, 1980, pp. 43-50.

Page is an English author, editor, and educator whose works include studies of Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and D. H. Lawrence. In the following essay, he examines Ford's treatment of ritual and conformity as hallmarks of social stability in Parade's End.

Certain novelists, in common with many of us who are not novelists, betray an addiction, usually unconscious, to certain words or turns of phrase; and in them, as in us, the reiteration may be more than a trivial mannerism—may, indeed, offer an insight, through a tiny verbal crack in the fence, into central preoccupations or obsessions. I do not think, for example, that any of Arnold Bennett's critics has pointed to his fondness for two words, one of them very unusual and the two of them in...