The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Joseph Conrad – serie

Since the publication of the Cambridge edition of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, the numerous letters in the nine volumes, many of them published for the first time and many more taken from hard-to-find books and journals, have had a profound influence on writing about Conrad. This selection makes the highlights available in one volume. The letters have been re-edited with shorter footnotes and an emphasis on the latest scholarship. Letters originally written in French or Polish appear only in revised English translations. Among the topics that stand out are Conrad's memories of growing up in Poland and Ukraine, his ideas about fiction, often expressed in precise but sympathetic comments on the work of his friends, the anxieties of war and revolution, his struggle to keep his integrity as a writer, and his lives as a sailor and a family man.

The first of a projected eight-volume edition of all the surviving letters of Joseph Conrad. Volume One opens with a child, not yet four, writing to comfort his imprisoned father and closes with an author, exile, and master mariner just turned forty.

This is the second of the projected eight-volume edition comprising all the surviving letters of Joseph Conrad. Once completed the edition will have assembled over 3,500 letters, one third of them as yet unpublished and many others only published before in inaccurate versions. The period covered by this volume, 1898-1902, was one of considerable achievement and anxiety for Conrad. The birth of his first child, the death of Stephen Crane, the murder of a friend's son, an encounter with an early X-ray machine, imperial wars in Cuba and South Africa - these events forced Conrad to face the problems of identity in terms of family, nation, history, and the cosmic order. This is also the period of 'Youth', 'Amy Foster', 'Typhoon', Lord Jim, and 'Heart of Darkness'. Often funny, always thoughtful, full of verbal energy even in the toils of severe depression, the letters in Volume Two present Conrad at a crucial though vulnerable moment of his life and literary career.

This volume presents all known Conrad letters from the years 1917-1919 in a framework which highlights their literary, historical, cultural, and biographical significance. Like its predecessors, this volume includes a high proportion of previously unpublished letters, and many of those already published have appeared only in small-circulation journals. Again like its predecessors, this volume is full of surprises that require us to remould our understanding of Conrad's writings. His correspondence for these years reveals his state of mind as he and his family dealt with the constant anxieties of the war-time years, and the return to a fragile peace. During this time, Conrad published three novels - The Shadow-Line, The Arrow of Gold, and The Rescue - together with a considerable amount of shorter work, was preparing for the publication of his collected works on both sides of the Atlantic, and was engaged in a critical rereading of his earlier books.

This penultimate volume of Conrad's collected letters ends soon after his 65th birthday. Over the previous three years, Conrad wrote The Rover, struggled with Suspense, translated The Book of Job (a Polish comedy), collaborated with J. B. Pinker on a cinematic treatment of 'Gaspar Ruiz', and worked by himself on adapting The Secret Agent for the London stage. He saw the publication of The Rescue, Notes on Life and Letters, and the Doubleday/Heinemann collected edition, most of whose volumes had new Author's Notes. Especially in North America, the collected edition strengthened his reputation as the leading English-language novelist of his day. This recognition could not always console him for his worries about his health, his family, and the state of post-war Europe, but he had not lost his sense of irony. These letters, the majority new to scholarship, abound in striking turns of phrase and unexpected insights.

Volume Eight of Conrad's collected letters covers the last nineteen months of his life (1923-24). Much of this correspondence is unpublished; its editors have had access to the major private collections as well as holdings in public and academic libraries. The letters themselves are accompanied by notes on contexts, allusions, and editorial problems, and prefaced with a general introduction and biographies of the correspondents. Letters to his family written during his visit to the United States are a notable feature of this collection, which is also rich in comments on literary questions, current events, his experiences at sea, the reception of The Rover, and work on his unfinished novel, Suspense.

The last volume in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad presents over two hundred new letters written between 1892 and 1923. Some are to correspondents who have not previously appeared in the collected letters; others are to family members, friends, and colleagues familiar from earlier volumes. Many of the letters in both categories are substantial enough to justify a recharting of Conrad's work, his friendships, his experiences, and his opinions on such subjects as opera, marriage, editorial tampering, the reading public, British foreign policy, the consolations and the penalties of faith, the Dutch Empire, translating Maupassant, the power of oratory, the revolutions of 1917, and the deficiencies of Ibsen's Ghosts. This volume holds enough surprises to suggest that there can never be a final word on Conrad and includes indexes and further apparatus for the whole series.