Some Do Not

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 facade, 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.