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| You are in National Portrait Gallery | What's on? | Joseph Conrad | |||||||||
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Joseph Conrad 1857-1924 28 September 2007 - 12 February
2008
Joseph Conrad |
'My
task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written
word, to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, above all,
to make you see.' Joseph Conrad, 1897 Conrad is recognised as one of the greatest novelists in the English language. In works such as Heart of Darkness (1899) and Lord Jim (1911), he examined complex moral situations in exotic locations, often inspired by his twenty-year career as a sailor. His prose is marked by reflective irony and written with stylistic virtuosity, which is all the more remarkable for a writer who did not know a word of English until he was nineteen, and never spoke it fluently. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in the Ukraine, to upper-class Polish parents, Conrad read authors such as Dickens in French translation. He was orphaned in childhood and became a sailor aged sixteen, an unusual decision for a boy of his class and nationality. His adventurous life on the seas, travelling the world with the French and English merchant navy, provided rich source material for his later writing: what Henry James described as his 'immense treasure'. Conrad settled in England, marrying Jessie George and becoming a naturalised British subject in 1896. His major phase as a writer was between 1897 and 1911, living for much of that time near Hythe in Kent. Major works include: The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907) and Under Western Eyes (1911). |
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All images and text are subject to copyright
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