The Rover

Jean Peyrol has spent nearly fifty years at sea — master-gunner, deserter, privateer, a Brother of the Coast who has roved the outer oceans and means now to rove no more. He comes home to the Provençal coast he left as a boy, with a hoard of plundered gold sewn into his clothes and no wish but to be left in peace, and settles at a lonely farm on the Giens peninsula, within sight of the English ships that blockade Napoleon's Toulon.

The farm is a haunted place. Its young owner, Arlette, came back from the horrors of the Revolution with her mind half-broken; she lives between her grim aunt Catherine and Scevola, a 'blood-drinker' of the Terror whom everyone fears. When a young naval officer, Lieutenant Réal, begins riding out to watch the coast, Arlette slowly comes back to life in love with him — and the old rover watches it all. Then the navy hands Réal a near-suicidal mission: to carry false dispatches into the hands of the blockading English. Peyrol, who had thought himself finished with the sea and with caring for anyone, quietly takes the errand upon himself, and makes of his last hour at sea a deliberate gift.

The Rover (1923) was the last novel Joseph Conrad lived to finish, written a year before his death and headed by the lines from Spenser that are carved on his own gravestone: Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life, does greatly please. Quieter and more serene than the great storm-centres of his earlier work, it is an autumnal meditation on rest after a lifetime of action, on loyalty, and on a good death — a sailor-novelist's farewell, written as he reached his own harbour at last.

This edition presents the complete public-domain text of the 1923 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.