The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad

Description

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.

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.

'... the meticuolous editing of the letters themselves, the supporting documentation - chronology, photographs, biographies of recipients, holders and sources of the letters, footnotes, indexes, statements of editorial principles ad the introductions - are nothing less than superb. ... Throughout, they have indeed offered us 'the feast of reason and the floe of soul' through this intimate contact with the life, mind and art of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers.' Mara Kalnins, Notes and Queries 'What is so remarkable about these late letters is their energy, freshness and originality ... We turn to the letters, as to the fiction and essays, in order to experience a vanished world and to understand better the mind and temperament that transited to contemporary and future generations those values on which the health of human society depends ... Volume 9 contains gems enough to enrich our understanding of that complex and elusive figure whose work so profoundly influenced the development of the modernist novel. ... In previous reviews of volumes in the magnificent Cambridge University Press The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad this reviewer has paid tribute to the edition, which is unrivalled for clarity, precision of presentation, and accuracy of scholarship. In addition to the meticulous editing of the letters themselves, the supporting documentation are nothing less than superb. ... The achievement of Laurence Davies and his co-editors in these final two volumes, as in the earlier ones, is beyond praise.' Mara Kalnins, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge '... The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad ... is exemplary in its attention to the detail, the accuracy of the transcriptions and the dedication of the editorial team to their task ...' Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society