A Personal Record and The Mirror of the Sea

Joseph Conrad is a largely enigmatic presence in his novels, but in A Personal Record he decided to introduce his readers to “the figure behind the veil”. Almost equally revealing is The Mirror of the Sea, written in “tribute to the sea, its ships, and its men, to whom I remain indebted for so much which has gone to make me what I am”. Both are full of Conrad’s anecdotes and adventures about smuggling arms to Don Carlos, a claimant to the Spanish throne, and characters like the great-uncle who once had to eat a Lithuanian dog during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. They also let us see inside the young man who broke with his Polish background and was deeply inspired by the resilience and devotion to duty of his fellow British sailors. Every page is filled with a powerful moral intelligence and sense of history.