Un giorno ancora

Joseph Conrad, speaking of the character of Bessie, calls her ‘the first conscious female creation in the whole body of my work’.
Bessie suffers the psychological anguish of her blind father, who humiliates her and treats her like a servant in the belief that it is her duty, as his daughter and woman, to fulfil such a role. He thus prevents her from living her life freely and choosing her future.
Captain Hagberd, on the other hand, draws Bessie into his world of madness and illusions. He, too, would have liked to choose the fate of his son Harry, who, however, preferred to run away rather than submit to his impositions, and now the captain gets it into his head that Bessie could be the ideal wife for the lost son he has not seen for sixteen years. When Harry returns for real, Bessie is confronted with the mentality of no longer two men but three, becoming definitively aware of the sad reality in which she is trapped.