Serialized in Ford Madox Ford's English Review in 1908–9, A Personal Record (1912) both documents and fictionalizes Conrad's early life and the opening stages of his careers as a writer and as a seaman. It is also an artistic and political manifesto. This volume provides the most accurate and scholarly edition available. Mistakes introduced by typists and earlier publishers have been corrected to present the text as Conrad intended it. The introduction traces Conrad's sources and gives the history of writing and reception. The essay on the text and the apparatus set out the textual history. The notes explain literary and historical references, identify places, and gloss foreign terms. Four maps and a genealogical table supplement this explanatory material. This edition of A Personal Record, established through modern textual scholarship, presents Conrad's reminiscences and the volume's two prefaces in forms more authoritative than any so far printed.

This volume provides an accurate text of Joseph Conrad's most important autobiographical work A Personal Record. Mistakes introduced by typists and earlier publishers have been corrected to present the text as Conrad intended it to be. The work is accompanied by an authoritative introduction, by notes that explain geographical, historical, and literary references, by genealogical charts and maps, and by textual matter that documents the evolution of the text.

Chronology; Abbreviations; Introduction; A Personal Record; Author's Note; A Familiar Preface; The Texts: An Essay; A Personal Record; Serialization; Book Editions; 'A Familiar Preface'; Copy-texts; Emendation; The 'Author's Note'; The Cambridge Texts; Apparatus; Emendation and Variation; Emendations of Accidentals; End-of-line Word-division; Appendix; Extracts from Tadeusz Bobrowski's Pamietnik; Notes.