This novel, one of two collaborations between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, is one of the earliest to be concerned with modern, mechanical culture, and as such foreshadowed other writers such as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Symbolising the collapse of old treasured political values at the turn of the century and underlining the urgency of renovation, the novel involves the unrequited love for a young woman of Arthur Granger, an aristocratic and unsuccessful novelist. Granger betrays the ideals on which he prides himself for this woman, a nameless, ethereal and goddess-like agent from a strange world. The collaboration between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford influenced their own independent work and, in the words of Ezra Pound, 'What Flaubert had done to change French prose, Conrad and Ford did to transform English prose.'