Lord Jim is a work of Conrad’s early maturity as a writer, and it is part of his genius to have crafted such sophisticated and subtle prose, which established him as one of the first English ‘Modernists’, while writing in his third language. Along with Nostromo. Lord Jim is widely considered to be one of Conrad’s masterpieces, drawing as it does on so much of the author’s firsthand experiences in the Far East, and as a ship’s officer. Conrad originally conceived Lord Jim as a short story, but he seems to have been taken over by the story and above all by the character of ‘Tuan Jim’, and so turned the tale into a full length adventure novel with deep psychological insights.