Conrad in His Quest for Youth — Leonard Merrick

Complete and Unabridged. 279 Pages. Leonard Merrick (1864 - 1939) was an English novelist. Although largely forgotten today, he was widely admired by his peers, J. M. Barrie called Merrick the novelist's novelist.* * * *An excerpt from the Introduction by J. M. Barrie. A Disquieting sentimental journey would be down the obituary column of The Times in search of the novel-readers who have gone and died without ever knowing of the sentimental quest of Conrad. They would be the great majority, it seems, and we may drop a sigh for them or a Serve you right, according to their opportunities. Incomplete lives. It is from such reflections by a number of Mr. Merrick's fellow-writers that this edition of his books has sprung, of which Conrad in Quest of His Youth is the first volume. Disagreeing among themselves on most matters, probably even on the value of each other to the State, they are agreed on this, that Mr. Merrick is one of the flowers of their calling; and they have, perhaps, an uneasy feeling that if the public will not take his works to their hearts there must be something wrong with the popularity of their own. Unless you like Merrick also, please not to like me. Or we may put it more benignantly in this way, that as you, the gentle reader, have been good to us, we want to be good to you, and so we present to you, with our compliments, just about the best thing we have got - an edition of Mr. Merrick's novels. There have been many author's editions, but never, so far as I know, one quite like this, in which the author is not the writer himself but his contemporaries, who have entirely engineered the edition themselves and have fallen over each other, so to speak, in this desire to join in the honour of writing the prefaces.