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Amy Foster – a study guide

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Joseph Conrad - portrait

Amy Foster (1901) first appeared in the London Illustrated News and was published with Conrad’s other tales of endurance and extreme conditions, Falk, and The Secret Sharer, to form the collection Typhoon and Other Tales in 1903. What looks at first as if it is going to be a tale of positive redemption turns out to be a grim parable of a tragic or even pessimistic view of the world.

Plot summary

Yanko Goorall is a poor emigrant from ‘the eastern range of the Carpathians’. His family have made sacrifices and raised the money to send him in search of a new life in America, via an unscrupulous organisation. He travels across Europe in very difficult conditions, and is then a sole survivor of a shipwreck off the coast of Kent.

He has lost everything, is hungry, wretched, and knows no English, For days he staggers around the coastal marshlands. When he comes into contact with local inhabitants, they regard him as a madman, shun him, and throw stones at him. Finally, Amy Foster takes pity on him and gives him something to eat.

A neighbour provides him with some rudimentary shelter, and he gradually starts working and making himself useful. Amy is attracted to his foreign appearance, and falls in love with him. Against opposition from neighbours and relatives, she marries Yanko and they have a son. He is even given a house in return for saving a child’s life.

Some time later Yanko falls ill and rapidly descends into a delirious fever in which he reverts to his native Polish. Amy takes fright and deserts him in his most urgent moment of need, when he is crying out to her for water. Next day he is dead.

Principal characters

I	the unnamed outer narrator
Dr Kennedy	a retired naval surgeon, and the principal inner-narrator
Isaac Foster	a farmer
Amy Foster	his daughter
Mr Smith	the tenant at New Barns Farm
Swaffer	Smith’s neighbour
Yanko Goorall	an east European emigrant
Johnny Goorall	Yanko and Amy’s son

Film adaptation

Director Beeban Kidron (1997)

“Amy Foster”, renamed “Swept from the Sea” starring Rachel Weiz and Vincent Perez

Study resources

Amy Foster – Oxford World Classics edition

Amy Foster – Kindle eBook (includes screenplay)

Amy Foster – DVD film adaptation

Amy Foster – free eBook at Project Gutenberg

Joseph Conrad: A Biography

The Complete Critical Guide to Joseph Conrad

Notes on Life and Letters

Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Biography

Commentary and notes

The emigrant experience

Yanko’s anguished journey across northern Europe is a deeply felt account of emigration and social isolation – one which reflects the experience of the many thousands of souls who uprooted themselves in their search for a better life in the West. Yanko is culturally and linguistically cut off from everything he experiences in transit.

Conrad’s great artistic achievement in this story is in these passages is to show the world through the emigrant’s naive and unsophisticated point of view. Yanko doesn’t understand where he is or what is going on around him. But we know he is on the railroad, passing through Berlin, or embarking on the ship that is to take him to America – or Amerika, for this was the route to be taken by Kafka’s Karl Rossman only a decade and a half later.

The passages dealing with the shipwreck and its awful aftermath are ones which Conrad imagined many times in his reflections on tragedies and accidents at sea, from Lord Jim and Typhoon to The Shadow-Line.

When Yanko touches dry land the story takes on distinctly Dickensian tones of the inhospitable marshes, and Amy Foster’s gesture of bringing bread to succour a ragged and desperate fugitive in precisely the same location as Pip’s generosity to Magwitch is a pure echo of Great Expectations.

Yanko’s positive determination to survive is a contrast to the xenophobic reaction of the locals, who with the exception of Swaffer and Dr Kennedy treat him abominably. Yanko survives and even prospers, with the ‘immigrant mentality’ of sceptical but stoic endurance. He seems to eventually integrate successfully, and yet ultimately he is betrayed by his own rescuer. Amy denies him in his most extreme moment of need.

Conrad was not a religious man, but there is everything in the story to suggest a Christian reading of the tale. Yanko suffers exile, shipwreck, humiliation, whiplashes, stoning, scorn, and rejection – yet he endures and forgives those who torment him. And he is ‘rescued’ by a simple girl who takes pity on him.

Since Yanko comes from eastern Europe it is common for critics to read the story biographically. Conrad’s family suffered exile at the hands of the Russians, and Conrad himself was technically an outsider in English society – even though he became a naturalized British subject in 1886 as soon as he had completed his examinations for the merchant service.

A great deal is made in the story of Yanko’s inability to express himself – though Conrad had been tri-lingual (Polish, English, French) since his childhood.

The narrative

In common with many of Conrad’s other tales and novels, the narrative is noticeably indirect. An un-named outer narrator introduces the story, but its main events are relayed to us by Dr Kennedy, one of the few local characters who is sympathetic to Yanko and his plight.

Joseph Conrad’s writing

Joseph Conrad - manuscript page

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.

Joseph Conrad - writing table

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Other work by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.

Heart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. [This volume also contains 'An Outpost of Progress' - the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures 'Heart of Darkness'.]

Chance is the first of Conrad’s novels to achieve a wide commercial success, and one of the few to have a happy ending. It tells the story of Flora de Barral, the abandoned daughter of a bankrupt tycoon, and her long struggle to find happiness and dignity. He takes his techniques of weaving complex narratives to a challenging level here. His narrator Marlow is piecing together the story from a mixture of personal experience and conversations with others. At times it is difficult to remember who is saying what to whom. For advanced Conrad fans only. Make sure you have read some of the earlier works first, before tackling this one.

Joseph Conrad links

Joseph Conrad stories

Studies in the short story

Essential short stories

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