The life of Joseph Conrad - John Batchelor

Joseph Conrad was born in the Ukraine in 1857 and died near Canterbury in 1924, having become the major British novelist of his time. John Batchelor's important new biography of this most extraordinary, enigmatic figure, uses archive material, as well as published sources, to reveal the especially close relationship, at every stage of Conrad's writing career, between his life and work.

Conrad was both depressive and delinquent. He manipulated friends, such as Ford Madox Ford, Edward Garnett, and John Galsworthy, into relationships that went at least some way to meeting his urgent psychological needs. He suffered from virulent writer's block, and would accept substantial advances from publishers and his agent, J. B. Pinker, for works which he then found himself unable or unwilling to write. Many of his best–known works, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Nostromo, for example, can be seen as forms of escape from uncongenial duties.

Batchelor's study, which gives full account of the complex and fugitive Polish background, reveals, with enormous skill, Conrad, the great writer, as being also one of the most tormented and self–defeating of our literary figures.