Some Do Not (1924) is a novel by Ford Madox Ford. Set during the First
World War, the novel is the story of Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant
statistician and wealthy aristocrat known as "the last Tory." As he
moves from a faithless marriage into an affair of his own, eventually
volunteering to fight under dubious--perhaps suicidal--motives, Tietjens
appears both symbolic and tragically human, a casualty of a dying era
dedicating its final breaths to death, despair, and destruction. Adapted
for television twice--a 1964 series starring Ronald Hines and Judi
Dench, as well as a 2012 series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and
Rebecca Hall--Parade's End is essential to Ford's reputation as a
leading novelist of the twentieth century. In the words of W. H. Auden,
"There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great:
Parade's End is one of them." In the years of tenuous peace leading up
to the Great War, Christopher Tietjens is known as a brilliant man with
a distinguished past and a promising future ahead of him. Behind his
successful façade, however, he devotes himself to work in order to avoid
confronting his unfaithful wife Sylvia, a prominent aristocrat.
Additionally, Tietjens finds himself alienated by a modernizing Britain,
which no longer seems to belong to the landed gentry from whom he
descends. Caught up in a passionate affair with a beautiful young
Suffragette, despairing over his marriage and social life, he decides to
enlist in the army at the onset of war with Germany, leaving his
peers--but not his past--behind. With a beautifully designed cover and
professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Ford Madox Ford's
Some Do Not is a classic work of British literature reimagined for
modern readers.
