A Personal Record

Description

Serialized in Ford Madox Ford's English Review in 1908-9, A Personal Record (1912) both documents and fictionalizes Conrad's early life and the opening stages of his careers as a writer and as a seaman. It is also an artistic and political manifesto. This volume provides the most accurate and scholarly edition available. Mistakes introduced by typists and earlier publishers have been corrected to present the text as Conrad intended it. The introduction traces Conrad's sources and gives the history of writing and reception. The essay on the text and the apparatus set out the textual history. The notes explain literary and historical references, identify places, and gloss foreign terms. Four maps and a genealogical table supplement this explanatory material. This edition of A Personal Record, established through modern textual scholarship, presents Conrad's reminiscences and the volume's two prefaces in forms more authoritative than any so far printed.

Zdzislaw Najder is Professor of English at the University of Opole, Poland. J. H. Stape, a Research Fellow in St Mary's University College at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, has taught in universities in Canada, France and the Far East, and has published extensively on Conrad's life and work. The editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (1996), he has also edited Conrad's A Personal Record and Notes on Life and Letters and co-edited Volume Seven and Nine of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad for Cambridge University Press. General Editor of seven Conrad volumes in Penguin Classics, he serves as contributing editor to The Conradian: The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK). He has also written on Thomas Hardy, Virginia, Woolf, William Golding and Angus Wilson.