Cambridge UP Conrad Editions

THESE ARE two of Conrad’s best novels. They offer insights that one gets only from a great writer. The Shadow-Line (1917) allows us to experience the feelings and thoughts of a new captain facing very serious difficulties on his first voyage. Under Western Eyes (1911) explores the tormented mind of a reluctant Tsarist government spy. Readers feel that the experiences related in these works, however foreign, are being rendered with complete and convincing authenticity; and the fact that they were written a hundred years ago does not cause any lessening of their intensity. Scholarly readers naturally want to understand how such powerful works were composed, on which experiences they were based, and what problems attended their production. Most of all, Conradians want to be sure they are reading texts as close as possible to those which Conrad intended us to read. Hence the necessity for an excellent edition.

We expect a lot from an edition under the aegis of the Cambridge University Press, and in both cases we get it. Each volume includes a detailed chronology of Conrad’s life and work; a substantial introduction probing biographical, historical and literary influences; a detailed essay on the composition of the novel and its texts; an apparatus consisting of a list of variants in the manuscript, typescript, and other sources; a number of appendices containing relevant correspondence and documents; explanatory endnotes about terms, characters, places and historical events in the novel; and relevant maps. Each of these sections is very detailed, meticulous, and convincing. Owing to the expertise and painstaking scholarship of the editors, readers achieve a comprehensive depth of understanding of each novel’s genesis, composition and textual history.

The essay on the manuscript and typescript (both of which are held at the Beinecke Library, Yale) and on other texts of The Shadow-Line is very detailed, revealing that the novel began as a short story that grew far beyond its original conception. Among many other things, we learn that Conrad took ten months to write the first half of the novel but finished it in another two months owing to his resort to dictation, and that the revisions that he and his editors made were limited to matters of style and punctuation rather than anything more substantial, such as changes in plot and characterization. When the work was finished Conrad had to deal with some of the travails facing most novelists, whether they are important writers or merely popular ones: for instance, the abridgement for publication in the American Metropolitan Magazine ruthlessly cut most of the original text, and for the novel’s publication in a British journal Conrad received only £100, a quarter of what he had hoped for. Stape and Simmons explain that the Cambridge edition is superior to previous editions in that Conrad’s choices are preferred wherever possible over those of his early editors, resulting in many changes that have been incorporated in the text for the first time. The essay is substantiated by an apparatus consisting of a meticulous seventy-seven-page list of emendations and other revisions in the various texts, which, along with the editors’ attempt to give us the most authentic text possible, is undoubtedly one of this edition’s strongest contributions to the study of the novel.

The volume’s introduction by Owen Knowles emphasizes important biographical and historical events that influenced the creation of the novel, such as the advent of World War I and Conrad’s son Borys’s service in that war. Knowles also discusses the ups and downs caused by Conrad’s arthritis and gout which resulted in the need for much of the novel to be dictated. The novel’s literary sources, such...