Ladies Whose Bright Eyes

Ladies Whose Bright Eyes is a novel by Ford Madox Ford. It was written in 1911 and extensively revised in 1935 and published under Ford's common pseudonym Daniel Chaucer. Although it has a time travel theme of a sort, is usually classed as mainstream literature rather than science fiction. As its author explicitly stated, "The idea of this book was suggested to me by Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". It occurred to me to wonder what would really happen to a modern man thrown back to the Middle Ages". Unlike Twain's Hank Morgan and some successors, Ford's Mr. Sorrel... makes only a very half-hearted attempt to build modern weaponry and machinery in the Middle Ages. His initial dream of constructing "guns and gas bombs" and making himself "mightier than kings" soon comes to naught. Though he had been a mining engineer in the Twentieth Century, he has no idea how to go about constructing such devices under Fourteenth Century conditions, or even where there are tin deposits. Having later in his career become a publisher does not give him any idea of how to invent printing from scratch and anticipate Gutenberg.
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