Almayer’s Folly: A Story of an Eastern River

Set in eastern Borneo during the 1880s, Almayer’s Folley recreates the conflicts of imperial Europe with the colonised East Indies through Joseph Conrad’s story of Kaspar Almayer’s personal tragedy: his loss of both his daughter of mixed race to her native lover and his dream of finding enough gold to return to Amsterdam in triumph. The introduction gives the history of the composition over almost five years as Conrad went to the Congo, Australia, the Ukraine, Belgium, Switzerland, and France as a seaman and on holiday. The novel has suffered seven layers of unauthorised intervention by typists and publishers, as set out in the essay on the text and the apparatus. The notes explain Malay terms and historical references, and there are two regional maps. This is the text of Almayer’s Folley, established through modern textual scholarship, as Conrad would have like it to have appeared in 1895.