Robert Hampson, a Conrad scholar at the University of London, offered these comments on The Shadow-Line for The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad: 

Conrad close to the time of his own shadow-line. (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

The Shadow-Line begins with the narrator’s younger self going through a period of crisis, which is presented as characteristic of ‘that twilight region between youth and maturity’. He gives up his job as mate and moves into the Officers’ Sailors’ Home, while waiting for a ship to take him back to England. There, he is unexpectedly offered the chance of commanding a ship whose captain has died, and jumps at the opportunity as the ‘ultimate test of my profession’. The story is then constructed in terms of the young captain’s expectations and their frustration by experience. His new role, which he at first sees as the ‘magical solution of all his life-problems’, proves to involve ‘an intricate network of moral imperatives, psychological discoveries, and social responsibilities’ [according to one critic]. Instead of the ‘more intense life’ that he had expected, he finds himself ‘bound hand and foot’; instead of feeling supported by the continuity of captaincy through the ‘succession of men’ who have been his predecessors, he experiences intense ‘moral isolation’. Subsequently, in the various crises the ship faces he feels himself judged and found wanting. In the end, however, through confronting his feelings of guilt and self-doubt, he achieves his professional identity. …

The Shadow-Line recounts a rite of passage into mature identity within the male world of the Merchant Navy. This, however, is not the only border with which the story is concerned. There are also the ‘shadow-lines’ between sanity and madness, the natural and the supernatural, and life and death. Ransome, for example, is not just the epitome of fidelity to duty, but, with his bad heart, is a constant reminder of the imminence of death. Arguably, what the captain learns is what Ransome physically embodies; the performance of duty in the full consciousness of one’s own weakness, the pursuit of ‘a difficult vocation upon an ocean of incertitude’. Liminal states and moments of transition, to which the title The Shadow-Line draws attention, are a recurrent feature of Conrad’s late fiction. Death, in particular, increasingly becomes a focus of attention.