Ladies Whose Bright Eyes

‘It occurred to me to wonder what would really happen to a modern man thrown back to the Middle Ages,’ Ford Madox Ford said after reading Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The fruit of this meditation is Ladies Whose Bright Eyes: a romance, first published in 1911 and then thoroughly revised and re-published in 1935. Ford draws wonderful characters and puts them through revealing and amusing paces. Mr Sorrel is a man given to romance but also with conventional ambitions, trying to make modern weapons in an ancient world and make himself powerful. But Ford is more interested in character and period than in technology, and when the possibilities of romance present themselves, Mr Sorrel makes the most of them. He is well on his way to acclimatizing himself and becoming a proper knight when, as suddenly as he departed, he returns to the twentieth century. Science fiction has seldom been more charming or beguiling than it is here.