Superficially, Mrs. Joseph Conrad seemed about the most unlikely imaginable wife for the great novelist, attracting many unkind comments from literary London about her plain looks, her dull personality, her limited education, her lack of stimulating talk. (At that rate, she could hardly have written a whole book unaided, and we must assume that this memoir was assembled with help from somewhere.)

But to those who knew the essentially unknowable Conrad, Jessie could actually be seen as the ideal helpmeet for the strange Polish aristocrat abroad, seen here for the first time as the acutely vulnerable creature he was, plagued with illness, often alarmingly eccentric, and struggling for funds almost to the end. Her placid outlook, her calm presence around the house, did much to balance his eternally neurotic state, and there is no doubting the strength of their bond.

Yet there is an unknowable streak to Jessie too. Of her background, we learn virtually nothing, except that she was called Jessie George, from a Scots family of modest means, living in North London, and that she was the second of nine children. As for how they first met, she just says ‘A mutual friend introduced us early in November 1894.’ And ‘he was the first grown man I had met who appeared to take a particular interest in me’ - a little surprising, as early pictures show her to be quite pretty; it was a knee injury that made her lame and then increasingly overweight. She might also have given us her view of his earlier love-life (if any), for it is a subject much obscured by deceptive reporting from Conrad and others. But he confided to her that his shipboard life had rendered him a stranger to domesticity and the company of women.

Both their sons went on to write their own memoirs in due course, giving more than a hint that the elder one, Borys, got into trouble over gambling and possibly more, well before this book was written, but no mother ever wrote ill of her son, and all we hear is that Borys’s war service ended when he was wounded and invalided out. She chooses this moment (1917) to close her chronological history without explanation, omitting Conrad’s last seven years, so it seems there was something to hide, possibly to do with Conrad’s suspected infatuation with an American beauty that Borys had brought home.

Meanwhile the war had complicated things further. With hindsight, July 1914 might seem an odd moment to take the family on holiday to Poland, but it was the first time he could afford to, after appointing a new American publisher who had successfully promoted his latest book. As the war news came rushing in, Conrad offered Jessie the choice of going home, but she knew how much he wanted to show the children his native land, and they decided to risk it - having to flee after all, and only just escaping internment, as they got on the train in Vienna that would take them to Italy and freedom. (Officials yelled at the driver to stop, but he couldn’t hear above the engine.) On that point, she ought to have explained a bit about the Polish situation, as Poland was not officially a nation at that time, only a ‘state of mind’, as many have commented. So her mention of the Russians blowing up bridges on the frontier is puzzling to many of us who thought Poland had been part of Russia at the time.

The last section of the book presents an interesting round-up of the books as she saw them - and she saw them close-up, as the typist, building a uniquely close relationship with them. Like myself, she thinks his best work was not a novel at all, but that fine book of philosophical reflections ‘The Mirror of the Sea’.