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"Subject to the qualifications thus disposed of (vide first part of notice), 'An Outcast of the Islands' is perhaps the finest piece of fiction that has been published this year, as 'Almayer's Folly' was one of the finest that was published in 1895. Surely this is real romance the romance that is real. Space forbids anything but the merest recapitulation of the other living realities of Mr. Conrad's invention of Lingard, of the inimitable Almayer, the one-eyed Babalatchi, the Naturalist, of the pious Abdulla—all novel, all authentic. Enough has been written to show Mr Conrad's quality. He imagines his scenes and their sequence like a master; he knows his individualities and their hearts; he has a new and wonderful field in this East Indian Novel of his... Greatness is deliberately written; the present writer has read and re-read his two books, and after putting this review aside for some days to consider the discretion of it, the word still stands"—Saturday Review

"This is a decidely powerful story of an uncommon type, and breaks fresh ground in fiction, ... All the leading characters in the book—Almayer, his wife, his daughter, and Dain, the daughter's native lover-are well drawn, and the parting between father and daughter has a pathetic naturalness about it, unspoiled by straining after effect. There are, too, some admirably graphic passages in the book. The approach of a monsoon is most effectively described. The name of Mr. Joseph Conrad is new to us, but it appears to us as if he might become the Kipling of the Malay Archipelago."-Spectator