The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime

Joseph Conrad

Feb 2022 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

This volume offers scholars the first authoritative text of two works produced collaboratively by two of the most important modern British novelists. Long hard to obtain and frequently neglected by critics, each can now be appreciated both in its own right and as part of the two authors' individual oeuvres. This scholarly edition situates both works in the context of the writers' meeting and ongoing collaboration, providing illuminating literary and historical references and detailing the works' composition history and reception in the UK and America. As well as establishing definitive texts of both works and of the authors' prefaces written for the 1924 republication of The Nature of a Crime, this edition also includes Ford's own 1924 account of his collaboration with Conrad on The Inheritors, as well as the text of Ford's 'The Old Story', a hitherto unpublished early draft of the basic plot of The Nature of a Crime.

About the author

Jeremy Hawthorn is emeritus professor in the department of language and literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway. He is the author of three monographs and many articles on the fiction of Joseph Conrad, and has co-edited three collections of essays on the writer. His The Reader as Peeping Tom was published in 2014, and the seventh edition of his Studying the Novel in 2017.

Max Saunders is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Life Writing and Research at King's College London. He is the author of Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (1996 and 2012) and, in addition to other scholarly publications, has edited five volumes of Ford Madox Ford's writing.