Joseph Conrad

Life

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 in Berdychiv, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine, to a family of the Polish landed gentry. His father was a writer and nationalist conspirator who was exiled to northern Russia with his family when Conrad was four. Both parents died of tuberculosis within a few years, and the boy was raised in Kraków and Lwów by his uncle.

At sixteen he left for Marseille to go to sea. He served in French ships and then, from 1878, in British ones, working his way up to master mariner and becoming a British subject in 1886. His voyages took him to the Far East, Australia and, in 1890, up the Congo River as a steamboat officer for a Belgian company, an experience that broke his health and gave him the material for Heart of Darkness. He left the sea in 1894 and published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, the following year.

Conrad married Jessie George in 1896 and settled in the Kent countryside, writing in a language he had learned as an adult and under constant financial and physical strain. Recognition came slowly; the novel Chance in 1913 was his first popular success. He declined a knighthood in 1924 and died of a heart attack that August at his home near Canterbury.

Literary significance

Conrad wrote some of the most carefully constructed fiction in English in a language that was his third, after Polish and French, and the slight strangeness of his prose is part of its effect. His recurring subjects are isolation, the testing of character under pressure, the gap between what men say and what they do, and the workings of empire in places where European rules do not reach. Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes are among the major novels of the early twentieth century.

His narrative methods, particularly the use of the storyteller Marlow and the arrangement of events out of order, were taken up by modernist writers, and his treatment of colonialism has made him a central and contested figure in postcolonial criticism.

Where to start

Heart of Darkness is short and is in this library; it is the usual first Conrad. Lord Jim, also here, is the fuller treatment of the same narrator and many of the same questions.