In ‘A Familiar Preface’, which Conrad wrote to A Personal Record in the late summer of 1911, he says that ‘this little book is the result of a friendly suggestion’. Even if true, this certainly is not the whole nor the essential truth. While it is highly probable that Ford Madox Ford encouraged Conrad to write his autobiography (he was to produce several autobiographical books himself), it is also evident that Conrad had his own very strong reasons. And, ironically, what Ford wanted to publish in his English Review – the monthly he started in December 1908 – was not ‘this little book’, but a much longer text.

The earliest mention of the proj ect we find in Conrad's letter to James B. Pinker of 18 September 1908: ‘These are to be intimate personal autobiographical things under the general title (for book form perhaps) of the Life and the Art … they will be concerned with Polish life and life at sea, intimate thought and sensations.’ By that time, however, the first section had already been written, to appear in the opening issue of the English Review. Five weeks before that letter, on 10 August 1908, Robert Lynd – then a well-known critic – had published in the Daily News a review of Conrad's recent volume of short stories, A Set of Six. He attacked Conrad for not writing in his native language: