Journal Article

\The Secret Sharer\: A Further Note on the Dates of Its Composition

REID, S. W., TROGDON, ROBERT W.

2007

Overview

Reid and Trogdon discuss the probable dates of composition of The Secret Sharer, a novel by Joseph Conrad. In 1987, a scholarly journal of Conrad's works published an article based on the hardest evidence for dating the inception of The Secret Sharer, namely, the inscription \"Dec 4\" on a clutch of the typescript of Under Western Eyes that signals a pause in the writing of the novel, at the end of 1909, which was occupied by Conrad's composition and revision of the story. Rightly leaning on the documentary evidence as superior to that in Conrad's letters of December 1909, where his memory is colored by the circumstances and his letters to J. B. Pinker are especially compromised by a need to minimize and justify this latest lapse in completing the novel, Keith Carabine argued persuasively that Conrad began the story either on December 4 or the previous day. In the end, he plunked for the 3rd, but on evidence, or reasoning, of a different order (\"Secret\" 212). Further analysis of the typescript has both complicated the picture and clarified it, resulting in the need to modify this conclusion slightly, and in such a way as to bring Conrad's own dating closer to the fact than it once seemed.

• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Subject: Authors, English / British & Irish literature / Composition / Conrad, Joseph (1857-1924) / Conrad, Joseph (British novelist) / Editing / English literature / Journals (Academic) / Novels / Persuasion / Reasoning / Source studies / Works / Writers / Writing