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monster in Mary Shel ley’s Frankenstein: he is lashed with a whip, stoned, and hit over the head with an umbrella before finally being locked up in a woodshed. During his imprisonment, Amy Foster, a plain-looking, unintelligent country girl, offers him bread, and they subsequently fall in love and marry. Yet as time progresses the cultural disparity between them becomes increasingly evident. Amy’s growing fear of her passionate, impulsive, and decidedly un-English husband’s strangeness reaches a climax when, during his bout of fever, what she mistakes for ravings (in fact, he is merely requesting water in his own language) frighten her to the point where she takes their infant son and flees their home. The abandoned Yanko dies the next day, Dr. Kennedy determines with evident symbolism, of “heart-failure” (p. 151), and the story concludes with the doctor reflecting on the irony that Yanko has been spared the fate of his drowned companions only to suffer and die for lack of human community in England: he has been “cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair” (p. 152).

Conrad was careful not to make the parallels between himself and his unfortunate protagonist excessively transparent. Unlike the devout Catholic peasant Yanko, Conrad was descended from Polish nobility and had long since lapsed from the faith. Yet while the tale is only obliquely autobiographical, its personal resonances are unmistakable. It is never explicitly stated that Yanko is Polish, but we are supplied with ample clues to make this determination. For example, we are informed that he has been a mountaineer, the term for which, “in the dialect of his country,” sounds “like Goorall” (p. 146), which bears a close resemblance to the Polish term for mountaineer, góral. And it is no coincidence that he washes up on the Kentish coast, the very part of southeast England where Conrad himself lived at the time he was writing the story. It is also important to recognize that Conrad believed himself to be an object of English xenophobia. For example, in an effort to account for the disappointing sales of his 1907 novel The Secret Agent, he wrote, “I suppose there is something in me that is unsympathetic to the general public.... Foreignness I suppose” (Collected Letters, vol. 4, pp. 9-10); and he consistently declined to give public readings of his work in Britain, explaining that “I am not very anxious to display my accent before a large gathering of people. It might affect them disagreeably” (Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, p. 283). Further, the story expresses Conrad’s sense of alienation not only from Britons generally, but from his English wife specifically. Notably, one of the titles he had considered before settling on “Amy Foster” was the distinctly autobiographical “A Husband,” and those aspects of the story that concern the incompatibility between Yanko and his provincial English wife are especially consonant with the circumstances of Conrad’s marriage. (The endnotes in this volume may be consulted for further information about the story’s autobiographical content.) Ultimately, of course, the tale cannot be reduced to mere veiled autobiography, but it does provide a revealing glimpse into the sentiments Conrad harbored toward his adoptive country that profoundly affected his fiction as a whole.

Like “Amy Foster,” “The Secret Sharer” (1910) makes an interesting companion piece to “Youth,” as it is also a tale of youthful initiation at sea recounted by an English seaman many years after the fact. Yet unlike in “Youth,” where passing the test is a fairly straightforward matter of keeping up one’s physical courage in the face of potentially deadly perils, in “The Secret Sharer” the emphasis is on the psychological tests of character that are associated with command. In the latter story, Conrad revisited the topic of seafaring after a long hiatus while writing political fiction, and the return to familiar subject matter appears to have made the writing process uncharacteristically smooth. The story,