A biography of Conrad that makes no claim to add to the voluminous information already on record, but runs amiably and quite deftly over the course, may have its uses. Not everybody has the time or the desire to tackle the thousand pages of Karl's Joseph Conrad, or the shelf of books - Jocelyn Baines, Norman Sherry, Zdzislaw Najder, Eloise Knapp Hay - that would provide a richer and more chaotic account of this mostly painful career; and not everybody will be put off by Mr Tennant's not saying anything very interesting about the fictions, of which he thinks Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness are the best. A lot of quite decent lives of famous people are not strictly necessary, though they are often the ones that get read. A good life of Edward Garnett, on the other hand, might, since his is a known but hardly a famous name, fail to attract much attention. But everybody who has an interest in 20th-century English fiction should read Mr Jefferson's book. It is sometimes a bit dull and occasionally ill-written, but it is probably the most important of the batch here under review.

LRB 6 May 1982 | PDF Download