Romance; A Novel. by

Romance is a novel written by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. It was the second of their three collaborations. Romance was eventually published by George Bell and Sons in London in 1903 and by McClure, Phillips in New York in March 1904. According to Max Saunders, Conrad, in his quest to obtain a literary collaborator, had been recommended by several literary figures. W. E. Henley pointed to Ford as a suitable choice for Conrad. Literary collaboration was not particularly uncommon when Conrad proposed it to Ford, but neither was it considered the proper way for serious novelists, as Ford was aware: "The critics of our favoured land do not believe in collaboration.." In his biography of Conrad, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (1924), Ford alleges that some opponents and critics did not hold the same reverence for his "literary friendship" with Conrad as that which he maintained. But his bond with Conrad had been "for its lack of jealousy a very beautiful thing." Indeed, Ford took the position that he gave Conrad some benefit as a bonding partner, writing: "I was useful to Conrad as a writer and as a man in a great many subordinate ways during his early days of struggle and deep poverty..." In an unpublished section, he withheld a frank passage of confession about his team writer where he contradicts the argument that Conrad "chose to live on terms of intimacy with a parasitic person," stating that such an accusation was as damaging to himself as it was to Conrad. Ford continued in the same vein about the choices open to Conrad, defending himself from criticism and showing awareness of the psychology behind co-writing: ..."if he chose to consult the person as to the most private details of his personal life and - what is still more important - as to the form and the very wording of his books, - if he chose for this intimacy a person of a parasitic type, he was less upright a man than might reasonably be supposed... And less of a psychologist." A critic and friend of Ford, R. A. Scott-James, reveals in an introduction to one of Ford's works, rather unbelievably, that Ford had spiritedly claimed to have taught Conrad English. Ford made a number of claims about Conrad that may not have been completely true. The writers' wives were involved behind the scenes in the collaborations, often to the despair of Ford, who omitted any mention of Jessie Conrad in his biography. Conrad and Ford agreed upon a collaboration on Seraphina, a novel that Ford had already begun work on. Conrad wrote to Ford encouraging him to visit: "Come when you like ... You will always find me here. I would be very pleased to hear Seraphina read. I would afterwards read it myself. Consult your own convenience and (especially) your own whim. It's the only thing worth deferring to." Another instance where making objections to collaborating occurred when Conrad wrote to Galsworthy commenting: "I am drooping still. Working at Seraphina. Bosh! Horrors!" and again after a further bonding session Conrad wrote that Ford's visit had left him "half dead and [he] crawled into bed for two days." Joseph Conrad (Polish pronunciation: [born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He joined the British merchant marine in 1878, and was granted British nationality in 1886. Though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an impassive, inscrutable universe. Ford Madox Ford (born Ford Hermann Hueffer ( 17 December 1873 - 26 June 1939) was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals.