JOSEPH CONRAD'S place in twentieth-century literature is now firmly established. His novels, stories, and other writings have become integral to modern thought and culture. Yet the need for an accurate and authoritative edition of these works remains. Owing to successive rounds of authorial revision, transmissional errors, and deliberate editorial intervention, Conrad's texts exist in various unsatisfactory and sometimes confused forms. In his last years he attempted to have his works published in a uniform edition that would fix and preserve them for posterity. But though trusted by scholars, students, and general readers alike, the received texts in the British and American collected editions published since 1921 have proved to be at least as defective as their predecessors. The Cambridge Edition, grounded in thorough research on the original documents, is designed to reverse this trend by presenting Conrad's novels, stories, and other prose in texts that are as trustworthy as modern scholarship can make them.

The present volume contains critical texts of A Personal Record and its two prefatory statements, ‘A Familiar Preface’ and the ‘Author's Note’. The Cambridge text of A Personal Record is based on the serial text with the following exceptions: Chapter 1 is based on the surviving revised serial proofs; the conclusion of Chapter 3 is based on the proof state recoverable in a published facsimile; a brief passage in chapter 6 is based on the sole surviving manuscript leaf.