Katherine Mansfield’s Daily Herald Review of Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue

Summary

Katherine Mansfield wrote two reviews of Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue. Her review in the Athenaeum (originally signed merely as ‘K. M.’) is well known to Mansfield scholars, but her review in the Daily Herald has not been previously collected. It was not unknown for a reviewer to review the same work in multiple venues but it was somewhat uncommon. Such instances typically occurred when the reviews were unsigned, or one was either unsigned or signed only with the reviewer’s initials. Although both of Mansfield’s reviews are very favourable, they are also quite different. Her Athenaeum review devotes much more space to plot summary, and her evaluation focuses primarily on Conrad’s ‘delightful airy perch among the mountains’ above even the ‘front rank’ of authors, along with his ‘romantic vision’ in the novel. In contrast, Mansfield’s Daily Herald review includes far less plot summary and far more commentary, and although she does evaluate Conrad’s novel, she also takes the opportunity in this review to broaden her commentary, contrasting the ‘psychological novel’ with the adventure novel, arguing that the psychological novel should be as thrilling as adventure fiction but that more often ‘we are presented instead with something drab, something dull that neither feeds us nor thrills us’.

Overall, this review is in keeping with the enthusiastic tenor of other reviews of The Rescue. After the publication of Chance (1914), it seemed that Conrad could do no wrong with the reviewers. It was the rare individual who dissented from the approbation of what Franklin P. Adams would term the ubiquitous ‘Conradicals’ of the day. By the time of The Rescue’s publication, Conrad’s literary stature was such that every new book was greeted as a literary masterpiece. Such was certainly true of The Rescue. Interestingly, the most prominent exception to this drift was Virginia Woolf’s unsigned review in the Times Literary Supplement, where she admitted to the book’s merits but also to her reservations concerning it: ‘It is as if Mr. Conrad’s belief in romance had suddenly flagged and he had tried to revive it by artificial stimulants.’ In expressing reservations regarding the novel, Woolf would anticipate later Conrad commentators who would similarly question the quality of his writings after Under Western Eyes (1911).