Jeremy Hawthorn (ed.), with the assistance of Max Saunders. The Inheritors; The Nature of a Crime

Abstract

The 2022 publication of The Inheritors (1901) and The Nature of a Crime (1909) in a single volume of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad offers two of the three collaborations produced by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford (Romance [1903] is the third). As this volume illustrates, the relationship between Conrad and Ford is of great interest to literary history, especially in relation to each author’s development of protomodernist narratorial techniques and the thematic focus of later works. Jeremy Hawthorn’s expert editing of the volume, with the assistance of Max Saunders, provides a welcome addition to the Cambridge series of authoritative texts of Conrad. The volume also presents much-needed new research into the complex nature and timing of the collaboration, the textual sources and contexts of the two works, and a comprehensive account of the choice of copy-text, textual variation, and helpful explanatory notes, including appendices, one of which publishes for the first time a tantalizing, early precursor of The Nature of a Crime in a fragment of Ford’s ‘The Old Story’ (Appendix B, p. 279).