In A Personal Record, Conrad describes writing the tenth chapter of Almayer’s Folly on board the Adowa in Rouen harbour. The remaining two chapters, which brought his novel to its fatal conclusion, were completed in only three months and on 22May 1894 he sent it off to a publisher. His choice of potential publisher was T. Fisher Unwin, a patron of letters and of considerable reputation. Conrad said that ‘Acceptance, came some three months later, in the first typewritten letter I ever received in my life’. He could scarcely have realised his own good fortune, that a first work, even of originality and merit, would be immediately accepted. An extremely unusual event and had he been more familiar with the world of publishing he would have recognised this as a miracle.

Every miracle needs a miracle worker, and this person was Edward Garnett, a man younger than Conrad and a professional reader who was then advising Fisher Unwin. Garnett immediately recognised the rare quality of Conrad’s work and was particularly intrigued by the identity of this new voice.. The strangeness of the tropical atmosphere, the poetic realism of his romantic story, made him think he was of eastern origin. No doubt he was quite surprised to meet a 38 year old master mariner of Polish origin.

Almayer’s Folly is the story of Kaspar Almayer, a man who betrays his own integrity, because he accepts Tom Lingard’s promise of his inheritance on the condition that he marries his adopted daughter. They then move to an isolated trading post on the Berau River in northeast Kalimantan and it is from this initial mistake that follow all his later woes.

From the opening sentence when Almayer stands on his veranda watching the river swollen with rain, a reader will know they are in the presence of a writer blessed with astonishing ability

One of those drifting trees grounded on the shelving shore, just by the house, and Almayer, neglecting his dream, watched it with languid interest. The tree swung slowly around, amid the hiss and foam of the water, rolling slowly over, raising upward a long denuded branch, like a hand lifted in mute appeal to heaven against the river’s brutal and unnecessary violence. Almayer’s interest in the fate of the tree increased rapidly. He leaned over to see if it cleared the low point below. It did; then he drew back, thinking that now its course was free down to the sea, and he envied the lot of that inanimate thing now growing small and indistinct in the deepening darkness.

All the hallmarks of Conrad’s fiction are stamped on the opening pages. The alienation of the individual, the uncaring brutality of the natural world, the serpentine sentences which begin with close observation and finish with a flourish of dark rhetoric.

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