Marlow’s Dream

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is a major figure in modern literature. Before his writing career was established in 1899 with the serialised publication of Heart of Darkness, Conrad was a merchant seafarer and eventually a shipmaster of vessels that regularly sailed between Europe and its antipodes, making half a dozen visits to Australia and stopping at numerous other ports along the way. In Marlow's Dream, Martin Edmond shows in vivid detail how, during those voyages, Conrad both collected and began to arrange the tales that would later appear in his fiction. Intertwining Conrad's biography with his own, Edmond masterfully demonstrates how Conrad's celebrated stories were lifted straight out of his experiences as an itinerant mariner who had spent countless days in antipodean ports between 1879-93.