Lord Jim
A young officer abandons a ship he believes is sinking, and spends the rest of his life trying to live down that moment. Conrad tells the story through Marlow, who collects accounts of Jim from other people, so the reader never gets direct access to his mind.
The novel is about courage, but more precisely about reputation and the stories people tell to survive their own history. The sea passages are excellent, and the final section in a remote island settlement is almost mythic. It is one of the great novels about a single mistake.
Public-domain status
First published in 1900. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Joseph Conrad died in 1924, so this work has been free to republish there since 1995.
Read the text free
- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 5658 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
- Internet Archive — scanned editions and free audiobooks
- Open Library — edition history and borrowable copies
Keep reading
- Moby-Dick — Herman Melville, 1851
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847
- Frankenstein — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1818
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
Find a print edition on Amazon · As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Disclosure