Lord Jim is a work of Joseph Conard’s maturity as a writer, and is one of the book which established him as a master storyteller and a great novelist. With this book Joseph Conrad set the style for a whole class of literature—the novel of the outcast from civilization finding refuge in the tropics.
The novel is set against a maritime background in the Far East. It brings out to the full, Conrad's lengthy, firsthand experiences as a Master Mariner prior to his becoming a writer.
Jim, chief mate on the steamship Patna, is a simple and sensitive character, a raw youth having dreams of heroism. When the Patna threatens to sink and the cowardly officers decide to save their own lives and jump in the few lifeboats, Jim despises them, but at the last moment, dazed by the horror and confusion of the moment, he joins them. Tortured by his act of cowardice and desertion that also wrecked his career in the Merchant Service and tormented by his ideal of what an officer should be, he flees from scandal, farther and farther East. It is only here in remote Patusan, holding the post given to him by the trader Stein, that he last finds the will to cease sacrificing himself on the altar of conscience....
Joseph Conrad (originally Teodor Josef Konrad Korzeniowski) was born in Russian-dominated Ukraine in 1857. His parents were punished by the Russians for their Polish nationalist activities and both died while Conrad was still a child. Conrad grew under the care of his uncle, Thaddeus Bobrowski, who was to be a continuing influence on his life. From an early age he longed to go to sea and in 1874 he travelled to Marseilles where he joined the merchant marine as an apprentice. His career as a sailor provided much of the material for his writing. In 1886 he became a British subject and a master mariner. In 1894, after twenty years at sea, he settled in England and devoted himself to writing.
In 1895 Conrad married Jessie George, by whom he was to have two sons, and his novel Almayer’s Folly appeared in the same year. The long subsequent series of novels, tales, essays and reminiscences established Conrad in the front rank of creative writers. Among his many other books are An Outcast of the Islands (1896), The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), Typhoon (1902), Youth (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Mirror of the Sea (1906), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Chance (1913), Victory (1915), The Shadow Line (1917), The Rescue (1920) and The Rover (1923). He also collaborated with Ford Madox Ford on two books, The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903). His autobiography, A Personal Record, appeared in book form in 1912 and his unfinished novel Suspense was published in 1925. He died in 1924 at his home near Canterbury.
Despite the immediate critical recognition that novels of Conrad received in his lifetime, his major novels did not sell, and he lived in relative poverty until the commercial success of Chance (1913) secured for him a wider public and an assured income. In 1923 he visited America, with great acclaim, and was offered a knighthood (which he declined). Since then his reputation has steadily grown and now he is recognised as a writer who revolutionized the English novel and was arguably the most important single innovator of the twentieth century.
