However, hopes of an idyllic retirement are to be cut short. Peyrol returns to the home of his childhood, and sets about rigging up a small boat for pleasure. The story concerns Peyrol, a sailor and adventurer with a colourful past who decides to settle down in post-Revolutionary France to retire with a small fortune that he has stolen. However, this was to be his final completed novel.

Of course The Rover was not intended to be Conrad’s last work, and he was still working on other books at the time of his death.

Indeed it is hard not to see something of Conrad himself in Peyrol, the sailor who gives up the sea, and returns to land, yet who always has his heart still with the sea. While there have been better Joseph Conrad novels, The Rover was a fitting and touching end to the long writing career of one of the greatest writers of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. He has been lauded as one of the most powerful, insightful, and disturbing novelists in the English canon despite coming to English later in life, which allowed him to combine it with the sensibilities of French, Russian, and Polish literature. This was useful when, because a need to come to terms with his experience, lead him to write Heart of Darkness, in 1899, which was followed by other fictionalized explorations of his life. He was deeply interested in a small number of writers both in French and English whose work he studied carefully. Joseph Conrad settled in England in 1894, the year before he published his first novel. He was hired to take a steamship into Africa, and according to Conrad, the experience of seeing firsthand the horrors of colonial rule left him a changed man. He was made a Master Mariner, and served more than sixteen years before an event inspired him to try his hand at writing.

He then began to work aboard British ships, learning English from his shipmates. He joined the French Merchant Marine and briefly employed himself as a wartime gunrunner. Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) was a Polish-born English novelist who today is most famous for Heart of Darkness, his fictionalized account of Colonial Africa.Ĭonrad left his native Poland in his middle teens to avoid conscription into the Russian Army.

The rover conrad