Conrad, Joseph

Two pages (8 7/8 x 5 in.; 202 x 128 mm) on paper. Capel House, Nr Ashford, Kent, 29 August 1917.

Conrad, offering his reaction to Grant Watson's The Mainland (Duckworth, 1917), begins: "Pardon the long delay. I only secured lately not so much the leisure as the proper freedom of mind, to read through and get on terms with your novel. Not that on terms was a difficult matter.  The book is captivating enough, in all conscience, as a piece of writing and of course as a story too."

Grant Watson moved between the English countryside and the expatriate colonies of Paris and Florence and Paris, not to mention London, New York and Palestine, cultivating relationships with Joseph Conrad, Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, Rupert Brooke, and Carl Jung along the way.