Conrad and Women

Supported by an enduring critical paradigm, the traditional account of Conrads career privileges his public image as man of the sea, addressing himself to a male audience and male concerns. This book challenges received assumptions by recovering Conrad's relationship to women not only in his life but in his fiction and among his readers. The existing interplay of criticism, biography, and marketing has contributed to a masculinist image associated with a narrow bodyof modernist texts. Instead, Susan Jones reinstates the female influences arising from his early Polish life and culture; his friendship with the French writer Marguerite Poradowska; his engagement with popular women's writing; and his experimentation with visuality as his later works appear in thevisual contexts of womens pages of popular journals. By foregrounding less familiar novels such as Chance (1913) and the neglected Suspense (unfinished and published posthumously, 1925), she emphasises the range and continuity of Conrad's concerns, showing that his later discussions of gender and genre often originate in the period of the great sea tales. Conrad also emerges as an acute reader and critic of popular forms, while his unexpected entry into important contemporarydebates about female identity invites us to rethink the nature of his contribution to modernism.

Jones constructs a convincing portrait of a man trapped between the dictates of domesticity and adventure ... a very thorough and insightful study which throws light on a little-covered area of Conrad's work, Spirited and scholarly study ... Jones is a discriminating reader, possessing an admirably thorough knowledge not just of Conrad's life and work, but also of the Polish literary scene at the turn of the century. As a writer with an ambitious brief - "to challenge the prevailing image of Conrad and to offer an alternative to its tenacious hold on the critical tradition" - she is further blessed with a light touch ... Jones is particularly dextrous at discussing Conrad's style in the context of phenomenological debate