Joseph Conrad - Death

Death

On 3 August 1924 Conrad died, probably of a heart attack. He was interred at Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, England, under a misspelled version of his original Polish name, as "Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski". Inscribed on his gravestone are the lines from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene which he had chosen as the epigraph to his last complete novel, The Rover:

Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after warre, death after life, doth greatly please

Conrad's modest funeral took place amid great crowds. His old friend Edward Garnett recalled bitterly:

To those who attended Conrad's funeral in Canterbury during the Cricket Festival of 1924, and drove through the crowded streets festooned with flags, there was something symbolical in England's hospitality and in the crowd's ignorance of even the existence of this great writer. A few old friends, acquaintances and pressmen stood by his grave.

Another old friend of Conrad's, Cunninghame Graham, wrote Garnett: "Aubry was saying to me... that had Anatole France died, all Paris would have been at his funeral."

Twelve years later, Conrad's wife Jessie died on 6 December 1936 and was interred with him.