Foreignness I suppose” (Collected Letters, vol. 4, pp. 9-10); and he consistently declined to give public readings of his work in Britain, explaining that “I am not very anxious to display my accent before a large gathering of people. It might affect them disagreeably” (Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, p. 283). Further, the story expresses Conrad’s sense of alienation not only from Britons generally, but from his English wife specifically. Notably, one of the titles he had considered before settling on “Amy Foster” was the distinctly autobiographical “A Husband,” and those aspects of the story that concern the incompatibility between Yanko and his provincial English wife are especially consonant with the circumstances of Conrad’s marriage. (The endnotes in this volume may be consulted for further information about the story’s autobiographical content.) Ultimately, of course, the tale cannot be reduced to mere veiled autobiography, but it does provide a revealing glimpse into the sentiments Conrad harbored toward his adoptive country that profoundly affected his fiction as a whole.

Like “Amy Foster,” “The Secret Sharer” (1910) makes an interesting companion piece to “Youth,” as it is also a tale of youthful initiation at sea recounted by an English seaman many years after the fact. Yet unlike in “Youth,” where passing the test is a fairly straightforward matter of keeping up one’s physical courage in the face of potentially deadly perils, in “The Secret Sharer” the emphasis is on the psychological tests of character that are associated with command. In the latter story, Conrad revisited the topic of seafaring after a long hiatus while writing political fiction, and the return to familiar subject matter appears to have made the writing process uncharacteristically smooth. The story, which draws on his own feelings and experiences as a first-time captain in 1888, was written in late 1909 with what was for him remarkable speed and ease, and he was quite pleased with it. As he affirmed in a rare self-congratulatory moment, “Every word fits and there’s not a single uncertain note” (Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 128). Most critics have agreed with this assessment; it has long been the most widely admired of Conrad’s short stories.

The story begins with the narrator wondering at the outset of his first voyage as a captain whether he “should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly” (p. 155). As it happens, the ensuing circumstances will provide the opportunity for an investigation of that very question, although the terms of the investigation will be considerably more complex and ambiguous than he can anticipate. The plot that subsequently unfolds is loosely based on the circumstances surrounding a famous episode of violence at sea. In 1880, on a sailing vessel off the coast of South Africa, a white first mate racially taunted and then killed a black crewman during an altercation between them. Several days later the captain secretly allowed the mate to escape, leading the crew nearly to a state of mutiny. The anguished captain subsequently committed suicide, by drowning himself, and the mate was eventually caught and convicted of man-slaughter. In Conrad’s version of the story, which is set in the Gulf of Siam and elides the race issue, it is without the complicity of his captain that the mate (here named Leggatt) escapes imprisonment on his ship. He swims to a nearby vessel, where he is taken in by the narrator, and much of the story is occupied with detailing the uncomfortable, and often comic, circumstances surrounding the latter’s efforts to keep the presence of his stowaway secret. Having successfully hidden Leggatt not only from his own crew but also from the captain and crew of the ship from which the errant mate has escaped, the narrator concludes his tale by describing how he has taken his ship on a dangerous nighttime maneuver in order to bring it close to shore in an effort to enable Leggatt to swim to safety.

Although “The Secret Sharer” has inspired a wide variety of interpretations, including political, sociological, and historical ones, by far the greatest interest in the story has been in its rich suggestiveness as a psychological tale. It has, accordingly, been subjected to a barrage of psychoanalytic interpretations. While Conrad maintained that he had no interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud, he was nonetheless intrigued by the complex duality of human consciousness, and this tale clearly reflects that interest. Throughout the story the narrator emphasizes his uncanny sense of identity with Leggatt—he characterizes the fugitive as his “other self,” his “double,” and his “secret sharer”; and he goes on to say of the duplicity necessitated by his efforts to keep Leggatt hidden, “the dual working of my mind distracted me almost to the point of insanity. I was constantly watching myself, my secret self.... It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it” (p. 170).