This study has, I hope, clearly demonstrated the extent to which French literature held a special place in Conrad's affections and career. The detailed evidence points to a profound Conradian debt, over his two most creative decades, to the modes, methods and traditions of French novelists – particularly Flaubert, Maupassant and Anatole France. Now the time has come to face some of the general issues and problems underlying the detailed evidence, and this will be done in three stages. In a first section, I examine the general questions of Conrad's literary traditions and the relative importance of personal experience and books in order to propose that our terms of critical reference need to be radically widened and redefined. I shall then examine the possible reasons which led Conrad to borrow as much as he did and, in broader terms, to make such extensive use of books. A coda suggests that the concept of ‘borrowing’ is too limited as a way of describing Conrad's varied engagement with books and writers and goes on to suggest other, richer, ways of describing the relationship between creative originality and literary dependency in his work.

Conrad's triple identity

Over the past two decades a number of studies have set out to explore, with varying degrees of success, the cultural origins and background of Conrad's imaginative vision. Let us first consider some representative critical views of Conrad's place in English literary traditions.