Chance

Flora de Barral is raised in luxury as the cherished daughter of a celebrated financier — until his vast empire of money collapses, the public he gathered in is ruined, and he is tried, convicted of fraud, and sent to prison. In a single afternoon Flora is flung from wealth into disgrace. Abandoned, exploited, and made to feel everywhere that she is a swindler’s unwanted daughter, she is brought to the edge of suicide.

From that edge she is drawn back by Captain Roderick Anthony, who falls in love with her and, in a fever of chivalry, marries her and carries her off aboard his ship. But the rescue is a strange, constrained one: so afraid of seeming to take advantage of a grateful, desperate girl, Anthony holds himself at a distance from his own wife, and Flora cannot tell whether she is loved or only pitied. When her ruined father is released from prison and comes aboard to live with them, the cramped ship becomes the stage for a slow, suffocating drama of jealousy and misread intentions that gathers toward sudden violence.

Conrad tells it not straight but through a chain of narrators — chief among them Marlow, the meditative storyteller of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim — who piece Flora’s life together from gossip, memory, and partial knowledge, folding time back on itself at every turn. Chance, Conrad’s only novel built around a woman, was the book that at last brought him popular success after twenty years of acclaim without sales — and it remains a searching meditation on fortune and fate, chivalry, and the loneliness of the human heart.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1913 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s composition and lasting power, a biographical note on Joseph Conrad, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.