SOURCE: A review of Parade's End in The Yale Review, Vol. XL, No. 1, September, 1950, pp. 189-91.

Pickrel is an American author, educator, and critic whose reviews have appeared in Commentary, the New York Herald Tribune, and Book Week. In the following excerpt, he suggests that Parade's End reflects Ford's belief that people will attempt to avoid loneliness and isolation at all costs.

The chief character in Parade's End is Christopher Tietjens, the younger son of a great Yorkshire family, a man who calls himself "the last Tory," who regards himself as a survival of the eighteenth century: a gentleman, a scholar, and (with a landlord's respect for the Biggest Landlord of them all) a Christian. Married to a beautiful, depraved woman whose object in life is to make him miserable, he falls in love with a younger and plainer girl and eventually, after he has served his country...