Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad

First published: 1903

Type of plot: Psychological

Time of work: The 1890's

Locale: East coast of England

Principal Characters:

• Yanko Goorall, an Eastern European; the sole survivor of a shipwreck
• Amy Foster, the Englishwoman whom he marries
• Kennedy, the country doctor who relates their story to the frame narrator
• Swaffer, the farmer for whom Yanko works

The Story

An unnamed narrator recalls a time several years earlier, when he was staying with his friend Kennedy, a country doctor in the English coastal village of Colebrook, near Brenzett. One day as he accompanied the doctor on his afternoon rounds, they came upon a dull-looking woman named Amy Foster, who was hanging out her wash. Kennedy asked after her son's health. As he continued his rounds, he told the narrator about this woman's recent life.

Although Kennedy agreed that the woman looked passive and inert, he confided that this same woman once had enough imagination to fall in love. The oldest child of a large family, Amy was put into the service of the Smiths, the tenant family at New Barns Farm, where she worked for four years. Meanwhile, she occasionally made the three-mile walk to her family's cottage to help with their chores. As Kennedy explained, Amy seemed satisfied with this drab life until she unexpectedly fell in love.

After the narrator and Kennedy passed a sullen group of men trudging along the road, Kennedy resumed his story, this time telling about a man who used to walk the village paths with such a jaunty, upright bearing that Kennedy thought he might be a woodland creature. The man was an emigrant from central Europe who had been on his way to America when his ship went down near the coast. He could speak no English, but Kennedy guessed that he had boarded the ship in Hamburg, Germany.

Kennedy then described the railway journey that had carried the German to Hamburg. After riding a train for several days before changing trains in Berlin, he reached the mouth of a river, where he saw a ship for the first time. There he lost contact with the three men who had recruited him to immigrate to America with the promise of his earning three dollars a day there. Using a telegraph, the three men secured passage to America for the man, whose father paid for the passage by selling livestock and part of his farm.

Kennedy again digressed to mention that he had patched this story together from fragments gathered over two or three years. When the castaway first appeared in Brenzett, his wild language and appearance shocked the town. Taking him for a gypsy, the milk-cart driver lashed him with his whip and boys pelted him with stones. The man ran to New Barns Farm, where he frightened Mrs. Smith. Amy Foster, however, responded with kindness. Though Mr. Smith thought that the man's wild appearance and indecipherable speech proved that he was a lunatic, Amy implored the Smiths not to hurt him.

Several months later, reports of the shipwreck appeared in newspapers. The emigration agents were exposed as confidence men who had cheated people out of land and money. Townsfolk speculated that the German may have floated ashore on a wooden chicken coop. At New Barns, he showed his appreciation for Amy's kindness by tearfully kissing her hand.

The stranger went to work on the farm of the Smiths' neighbors, the Swaffers, who had Kennedy examine the man. Observing the man's verbal and emotional isolation, Kennedy wondered why he did not go mad. The castaway's nightly thoughts returned to Amy Foster, who had treated him kindly. Eventually, the stranger learned a few words of English. One day he rescued Swaffer's infant grandchild from a pond into which she had fallen.

Kennedy could not describe exactly how the stranger made a new life for himself. The villagers still found his customs odd; his favorite songs, his religious habits, and his clothes all marked him as an outsider. He was a mountaineer from the eastern Carpathians whose first name was Yanko. His last name, as best as the locals could tell from his speech, was Goorall. This name, Kennedy recalled, survived in the parish marriage register.

Yanko began his courtship of Amy with a present of a green satin ribbon, and he persisted in spite of the warnings and threats of the townspeople. After Yanko asked for Amy's hand, Mr. Swaffer gave them a cottage and an acre of land—the same land that Kennedy and the narrator passed during their rounds—in gratitude for saving his granddaughter from drowning.

After Amy bore Yanko's son, Yanko told Kennedy about problems that he was having with Amy. One day, for example, she took their boy from his arms when he was singing to him in his own language. She also stopped him from teaching the boy how to pray in his own language. Yanko still believed that Amy had a good heart, but Kennedy wondered if the differences between them would eventually ruin their marriage.

After breaking off this story, Kennedy said that the next time he saw Yanko, the man had serious lung trouble brought on by a harsh winter. When Kennedy treated Yanko, he was lying on a couch downstairs, suffering from fever and muttering in his native tongue. Kennedy asked Amy to move Yanko upstairs to get him away from the drafty door, but she refused. Kennedy saw fear in her eyes but had to leave to treat his other patients. That night Yanko's fever worsened. Perhaps thinking he was speaking in English, he demanded water, but Amy could not understand him. As his demands increased in intensity, she took her child to her family's farm three miles away.

The next day Kennedy found Yanko outside his cottage. He took him inside and called for Amy, but Yanko told him she had fled the night before. Yanko weakly wondered why and then said the word "Merciful!" just before dying of heart failure. Over the years that followed, Amy never mentioned her husband.