Joseph Conrad (born Konrad Korzeniowski) has been fortunate in his biographers, beginning with G. Jean-Aubry and continuing with major biographies by Jocelyn Baines, Frederick Karl, John Stape, and, most importantly, Zdzisław Najder, who did so much to explore the novelist’s Polish beginnings. In The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, Maya Jasanoff acknowledges her predecessors in her notes but also goes beyond them in a “Further Reading” section, an exemplary account that I wish other biographers would emulate when they take on a much-studied subject. There she calls attention to the annotated Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, several memoirs, generations of scholarship, and many other books that put Conrad’s life and work into historical context.
What, then, can be added at this late date? Jasanoff’s subtitle provides the answer. She has set out not to write yet another comprehensive biography but instead to concentrate on those aspects of Conrad’s work that foretell the coming of a wider world. She has not confined her attention to the “specific sources for the novelist’s fiction,” his literary career, his writing process, finances, friendships, domestic life, and health. Although she does not avoid these topics, they are not her main focus, which is to show how four important novels––Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent––arose out of Conrad’s encounter with a changing, globalized world.
Four important novels arose out of Conrad’s encounter with a changing, globalized world.
