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29 CONRAD, Joseph. Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902 An important inscription to a potential inspiration for two characters in Heart of Darkness First edition, first impression, first issue, presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, “To Marguerite Poradowska. With the author’s dear love. 20th Nov 1902”. The volume marks the first book form publication of three novellas by Conrad, including Heart of Darkness , now his best-known work, and certainly his most enduring and influential.
The recipient, Marguerite Poradowska ( née Gachet) (1848– 1937) was related to Conrad by her marriage in 1874 to Aleksandr Poradowka. Aleksandr was a first cousin of Conrad’s maternal grandmother. Conrad first met the Poradowskas in February 1890 immediately before the death of Aleksandr and “Aunt Margaret” become one of Conrad’s closest friends in his early pre-literary career. Although French by ancestry, Marguerite had grown up in Brussels before residing in the Austrian sector of Poland. When she returned to Brussels she began a career as a writer and eventually published eight novels, in addition to a number of short stories and novellas. There are 110 surviving letters from Conrad to Poradowska, mostly dated between 1890 and 1895. As noted by Karl and Davies in their edition of Conrad’s Collected Letters , Marguerite Poradowska was a fellow writer who provided “a cosmopolitan link with Poland” and became a
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