ABSTRACT
Although now acknowledged as Conrad's supreme imaginative achievement and one of the greatest novels in English, Nostromo was at first very badly received. The poor critical reception of the novel was a major and lasting disappointment to Conrad. The form of the work caused reviewers most dismay; they saw the detailed evocations of scene and frequent disruptions of chronology and narratorial perspective as evidence of the author's inability to control or sustain the narrative. Early reviewers almost universally judged that Nostromo was over-long and that the discontinuous style of narration made it, as one critic unsympathetically remarked, "difficult to say when or where we are" (British Weekly, 10 November 1904, reprinted in Sherry, 1973). Nevertheless, Arnold Bennet thought it "the finest novel of [its] generation," and Edward Garnett praised its disregard for the conventions of realism that dominated the bulk of popular fiction (Sherry, 1973).
