The position of Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus” among his own works, or among contemporary classics, has been an ambiguous one. A brief glance at current Conrad criticism confirms its uncertain status : F. R. Leavis, whose opening statement of his book, The Great Tradition (New York, 1948), asserts, “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad,” gives a comprehensive treatment of Conrad without once mentioning Nigger, even among the so-called minor works; however, Morton D. Zabel, who reprints the whole of Nigger in his The Portable Conrad (New York, 1947), states (p. 291), “The book remains, if not Conrad's greatest or most ambitious, one of his most perfectly realized and poetically conceived works.” In view of the silence on the one hand, and the somewhat lavish praise on the other, by these two important critics, a reconsideration of the novel at this time is perhaps not out of place.
Elsie B. Michie. The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-1-4214-0186-7. Price: US$70.00