As has been noted, many literary precedents besides sea fiction and French realism have been suggested for Victory.

Among works which may have contributed to the novel's symbolism are Shakespeare's Hamlet (1601) and The Tempest (1612), the biblical story of Adam and Eve in Eden, and John Milton's Paradise Last (1667; the epigraph on Conrad's original tide was a quotation from Comus, Milton's youthful masque about a young woman's temptation). Lena's name for herself, "Alma," is Latin for "the soul," and Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (1590-1596) devotes a lengthy allegorical passage to describing the "House of Alma." However, it seems unlikely that Conrad was directly influenced by Spenser. In fact, the symbolic meaning of "alma" would not have been difficult for Conrad to discover.

These sources, suggested by various scholars, are cited by Robert Hampson in his "Introduction" and "Notes" to the Penguin edition (1989) of Victory. Even...