Joseph Conrad Chance

About Chance

Joseph Conrad's Chance (1913) was his first popular success — his most commercially successful novel and the work that rescued him from financial anxiety. Organized around Marlow's reconstruction of Flora de Barral's story through a complex system of secondhand accounts, Chance is both Conrad's most elaborate narrative structure and his most sustained attempt to portray a woman as a central consciousness. Its romantic plot made it more commercially accessible than his earlier, bleaker work.