The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: (The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Joseph Conrad)

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.

Table of Contents:
List of holders of letters; Published sources of letters; Chronology, 1920–1922; Introduction; Conrad's correspondents; Editorial procedures; Letters; Indices.

About the Author :
Laurence Davies is Research Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College and co-author of Cunninghame Graham: A Critical Biography. 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.

Review :
"This volume proves the enduring value of good editorial scholarship... The scrupulous attention to the minutiae of these letters ... will enable scholars for generations to come to explore the world Conrad inhabited in ways previously impossible." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920