Abstract
The chapter first addresses, through letters, Conrad’s interactions with several previously under-investigated, literate multilingual women with whom he shared reading, including translation projects. This not only challenges the received image of Conrad and women, including his relatives the Zagórskas (both mother and daughters), Elsie Hueffer, and Ada Galsworthy, but shows how these intellectual relationships differed from his interactions with men, and prompts reflection on Edwardian assumptions about women translators. Examining Conrad’s marital reading shows Jessie Conrad as an engaged middle-brow reader. Conrad’s own reading of women authors is compared with data on his male peers. The representations of woman readers in The Arrow of Gold, Under Western Eyes and Nostromo is followed by an examination of women readers in Chance, highlighting women’s magazines, access to libraries, women as reader-companions, and books as social props.
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Chambers, H. (2018). ‘Gifted with Tenderness and Intelligence’: Conrad’s Reading Women. In: Conrad's Reading. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76487-0_6
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