FREYA OF THE SEVEN ISLES（ISBN=） 英文原版

　　Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the
novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers.
Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature’s
greatest writers. In The ART OF THE NOVELLA series, Melville House
celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles
that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first
time. This little-known novella from one of the masters of the form
is so unusual for Joseph Conrad’s work in several respects,
although not in its exotic maritime setting or its even more exotic
prose–it is unusual in that it is one of his very few works to
feature a woman as a leading character, and to take the form of a
romance. Still, it’s a Conradian romance: a sweeping saga set in
the Indian Ocean basin, against a turbulent background of barely
suppressed hostilities between Dutch and British merchant navies,
told by one of Conrad’s classic detached narrators. In the end, the
unique perspective of the sharply etched character of Freya is one
of Conrad’s most piercing studies of how the lust for power can
drive men to greatness–or its opposite.