J. H. Stape, Senior Research Fellow in English at St Mary's University College, Twickenham, London, has taught at universities in England, Canada, France and the Far East. The author of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (2007) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (1996), he has edited Conrad texts for Penguin Books and Oxford World's Classics and co-edited Volumes 7 and 9 of Conrad's Collected Letters. He has also published on E. M. Forster, William Golding, Thomas Hardy, Frank Harris, Angus Wilson and Virginia Woolf. Allan H. Simmons, Professor of English at St Mary's University College, Twickenham, London, is the author of Joseph Conrad (2006) in Palgrave's Critical Issues series and Heart of Darkness: A Reader's Guide (2007) for Continuum. He has edited Conrad in Context (2009) and for Penguin Classics has co-edited Lord Jim and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and Other Stories (2007). He is the General Editor of The Conradian: The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK). Owen Knowles, Research Fellow at the University of Hull, is the author of A Conrad Chronology (1989) and An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Joseph Conrad (1992) and co-author of the Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad (2000). Advisory Editor to The Conradian: The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society, he has also edited a number of Conrad's works for Everyman's Library and Penguin Books and has co-edited Volumes 6 and 9 of Conrad's Collected Letters and two volumes of correspondence to and about Conrad.

'… provides us the opportunity for both an authentic and illuminating reading of the work not offered elsewhere.' The Times Literary Supplement

• General editors' preface; Chronology; Abbreviations and note on editions; Introduction; The Shadow-Line, A Confession; The texts: an essay; Apparatus; Textual notes; Appendices; Explanatory notes; Glossary of nautical terms; Maps.