‘The Inheritors’, New York Times Saturday Review 13 July 1901

Not long ago Mr. Conrad was catalogued as ‘a writer of sea tales.’ Whoever takes up The Inheritors under the impression that he has in store one of those masterly studies of the sea and sailors which delighted us in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ will lay it down half, or, more probably, a fourth, read, and with the sense of being cheated, unless he is carried forward by the authors’ power to visualize and realize what they frankly admit on the title page is ‘An Extravagant Story.’ The final verdict pronounced by this unwilling reader will depend upon his capacity to enjoy satire of a subtle and highly finished order—directed, if he is an Englishman, against some of the most cherished traditions and achievements of his country—and upon whether he is more interested in event for event's sake or for its potential and psychological relation to man.

The plot of the story, which has to do with colonization and development, the fortune of an unsuccessful novelist, and the intrigues of an unscrupulous young woman, is, on the face of it, neither original nor pleasant. But the treatment is fresh and unconventional, and Mr. Conrad's power of characterization, a poetic realism not unlike that of Turgeniev, and his sensitive appreciation of the conflicting subtleties of human motive and conduct, make the story actual and effective.

The tale moves swiftly and conclusively to a dramatic and wholly dissatisfying climax, but it is not the plot or the skill with which it is worked out that interests us, but the people who develop it and through whom it is developed. They are drawn ‘from the life.’ Churchill, the man of letters thrust into political leadership, the modest, high-minded English gentleman whose political support is finally won by his own distrust of his motives in withholding it, and who disposes of his political future with a gentle ‘one is tied down in these matters,’ is a living and lovable personality. The same breadth and delicacy of portraiture are shown in Granger of Etchingham, the novelist whose work is not too bad, but too good, to bring him fame—or bread.