Joseph Conrad’s Objects

Conrad begins his volume of reminiscences, A Personal Record, by recalling how he wrote the tenth chapter of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, in the winter of 1893, on board a 2,000-ton steamer called the Adowa “alongside a quay in Rouen” (Conrad 1923c, 3). This was Conrad’s way of acknowledging the importance of Flaubert for his conception of the novel as a form – and a way of invoking the spirit of Flaubert at the start of his reminiscences as a patron saint. Thus, he describes the ship’s ..