Lord Jim and the Short Stories of 1900–2

Abstract

Lord Jim was the next tale Conrad completed after Heart of Darkness, its composition concluded in July 1900. When he began it is less certain; he was working on it in May 1898, while still writing Youth and before turning to Heart of Darkness, and he may have begun a short story akin to the “Patna” episode as early as July 1896.* The novel is closely bound up with Conrad’s earlier work, to which it stands very much in the relation of a summation. Nostromo, the next major work, after a number of exploratory shorter tales, was to involve a radically new approach to the structural pattern.