When Joseph Conrad's novel Chance appeared in serial form in the New York Herald in 1912 and in book form in 1914 it established the author's financial security for the first time. Following years of struggle to reach a wide audience for his fiction, Conrad benefitted from the American marketing of this novel for the women readers of romance. Aggressive advertising promoted the writer's new focus on a female protagonist and Conrad's division of the story's location between land and sea. The novel proved popular and lucrative. Yet in spite of its economic success, Chance...

Conrad’s Drama: Contemporary Reviews and Observations collects both book reviews and performance reviews of Conrad’s three plays: The Secret Agent, One Day More, and Laughing Anne. These reviews and observations show how Conrad’s plays were received by his contemporaries. More than this, however, Conrad’s Drama reveals the larger conversations surrounding his plays: the state of British drama in the early 20th century, the role the drama critic has in a play’s reception, and the difficulty most fiction writers experience in trying to write for the stage. No other reference work...