Books with title Rover, The

The Rover is the last complete novel by Joseph Conrad, written between 1921 and 1922. It was first published in 1923, and adapted into the 1967 film of the same name.The story takes place in the south of France, against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Napoleon's rise to power, and the French-English rivalry in the Mediterranean. Peyrol (a master-gunner in the French republican navy, pirate, and for nearly fifty years "rover of the outer seas") attempts to find refuge in an isolated farmhouse (Escampobar) on the Giens Peninsula near Hyères. The story is about Peyrol's attempt at withdrawal from an action- and blood-filled life; his involvement with the pariahs of Escampobar; the struggle for his identity and allegiance, which is resolved in his last voyage.

Now considered Behn’s most famous and most accomplished play, The Rover is in many ways firmly in the tradition of Restoration drama; Willmore, the title character, is a rake and a libertine, and the comedy feeds on sexual innuendo, intrigue and wit. But the laughter that the play insights has a biting edge to it and the sexual intrigue an unsettling depth. As Anne Russell points out in her introduction to this edition, there are three options for women in the society represented here: marriage, the convent, or prostitution. In this marriage economy the witty and pragmatic virgin Hellena learns how to survive, while the prostitute Angellica Bianca can retain her autonomy only so long as she remains free from romantic love. It seems that in this world women can only be free by the anonymity of disguise—yet the mask is also the mark of the prostitute. And, paradoxically, disguise is the device that in many ways drives the plot towards marriage. Enormously popular through the eighteenth century, The Rover is now once again widely performed. Filled with the play of ideas, it is one of the most amusing, entertaining—and unsettling—of comedies.

The Rover is the last complete novel by Joseph Conrad, written between 1921 and 1922. It was first published in 1923, and adapted into the 1967 film of the same name.Conrad’s father, Apollo Nalęcz Korzeniowski, a poet and an ardent Polish patriot, was one of the organizers of the committee that went on in 1863 to direct the Polish insurrection against Russian rule. He was arrested in late 1861 and was sent into exile at Vologda in northern Russia. His wife and four-year-old son followed him there, and the harsh climate hastened his wife’s death from tuberculosis in 1865. In A Personal Record Conrad relates that his first introduction to the English language was at the age of eight, when his father was translating the works of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo in order to support the household. In those solitary years with his father he read the works of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray in Polish and French. Apollo was ill with tuberculosis and died in Kraków in 1869. Responsibility for the boy was assumed by his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, a lawyer, who provided his nephew with advice, admonition, financial help, and love. He sent Conrad to school at Kraków and then to Switzerland, but the boy was bored by school and yearned to go to sea. In 1874 Conrad left for Marseille with the intention of going to sea.Bobrowski made him an allowance of 2,000 francs a year and put him in touch with a merchant named Delestang, in whose ships Conrad sailed in the French merchant service. His first voyage, on the Mont-Blanc to Martinique, was as a passenger; on its next voyage he sailed as an apprentice. In July 1876 he again sailed to the West Indies, as a steward on the Saint-Antoine. On this voyage Conrad seems to have taken part in some unlawful enterprise, probably gunrunning, and to have sailed along the coast of Venezuela, memories of which were to find a place in Nostromo. The first mate of the vessel, a Corsican named Dominic Cervoni, was the model for the hero of that novel and was to play a picturesque role in Conrad’s life and work.