In the last years of the 19th century, a number of writers who were in exile in England began, as outsiders, to consider the drama surrounding the brittleness of English manners and morals and the pressures on English stability. This offered them an alluring, mysterious and, at times, evasive subject.

Henry James, for example, remained fascinated by the English system of inheritance in which, on the death of her husband, the widow was cast aside while her son inherited the property. James sought to dramatise this in The Spoils of Poynton (1896).

It was this world, too, which Oscar Wilde described in his comedies of manners written in the early 1890s, work in which no Irish characters appeared, in which members of the English drawing-room class are mimicked and mocked, masked and unmasked. So, too, the hero, whoever he is, of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) wallowed in the great unstable openness of London. The vast and various city, in all its ineffable mystery and otherness, offered these three writers an escape from their own narrow heritage, and a richly layered world to chart in its duplicity, and perhaps even its decline.

This close attention to English manners did not last long. James, once the new century had begun, returned to writing about Americans in Europe. Stevenson escaped to a more exotic landscape where he died in 1894. Wilde was destroyed by the very forces he mocked. The house of England, in all its glory, was not their property; they stayed as guests, watchful and untrusting.

Joseph Conrad, the great outsider who settled in England in 1894, the year before he published his first novel, was deeply interested in a small number of writers both in French and English whose work he studied carefully. Among these writers was Henry James. The relationship between his fiction and that of James may not seem obvious, despite the fact that, as Leon Edel has pointed out, Conrad's Heart of Darkness (written 1899; published 1902) bears strange similarities in structure and tone, if not in content, to James's The Turn of the Screw (1898). Conrad had sent James his second book, An Outcast of the Islands, in 1896, with an elaborately flattering inscription.

James admired the book and responded by sending him The Spoils of Poynton. Conrad thought that “the delicacy and tenuity” of James's novel “was a great sheet of plate glass - you don't know it's there till you run against it”. Ford Madox Ford reported “the rapturous and shouting enthusiasm of Conrad over the story” and suggested that it “must have been the high-water mark of Conrad's enthusiasm for the work of any other writer”.

James and Conrad met for lunch in London in February 1897. James was 53; Conrad 39. The piece of fiction that Conrad attempted immediately after their meeting was his story “The Return”, which is his most clearly Jamesian in tone and content, his most directly English in manner and background.

Conrad worked over and over on this story; the writing caused him a great deal of difficulty. When it was finished, no magazine would print it. The story, he wrote, “embittered five months” of his life. He moved from admiring it, to disliking it, to feeling a strange protective pride towards it. In his introduction to Tales of Unrest (1923), where it first appeared, he called it “a left-handed production”. The story, he pointed out, consisted “for the most part of physical impressions; impressions of sound and sight... rendered as if for their own sake and combined with a sublimated description of a desirable middle-class town-residence which somehow manages to produce a sinister effect”.

The story's sinister effect derives from the almost dismissive and quite reductive terms in which the contours of Alvan Hervey's comfortable and complacent life are set, versus his astonishingly rich, slow and detailed response to his wife's letter, his every move infused with poetic significance, every nuance of feeling full of shading and careful emotional manipulation. His wife's letter turns an unreflective Dr Jekyll into a Mr Hyde deeply haunted by essential and savage questions about existence; turns an orderly London household into a place of wild feeling, at times comic, and then unbearable in its despair.

“Truth would be of no use” to Hervey in the face of passion which is “the unpardonable and secret infamy of our hearts, a thing to curse, to hide and to deny; a shameless and forlorn thing that tramples upon the smiling promises, that tears off the placid mask, that strips the body of life”. Conrad reduced his fashionable Londoner, who enjoyed “the delightful world of crescents and squares”, to becoming a man who “stood alone, naked and afraid, like the first man on the first day of evil”.

For Conrad's men, women remain a great alluring mystery; sexual attraction moving towards guileless, puzzled obsession is a theme for him even in his later fiction. In stories such as “A Smile of Fortune” (1911) or “The Planter of Malata” (1914), a woman, unobtainable and strange, unsettles and then unmasks a hardened hero. In the latter story, she is “fresh from the thick twilight of four million people and the artificiality of several London seasons”. Nonetheless, “he felt himself in the presence of a mysterious being in whom spoke an unknown voice, like the voice of oracles, bringing everlasting unrest to the heart”.

“The Return” is Conrad in his most exotic territory: a house in London, not a boat in sight, utterly free of the Orient. It is set in “the impenetrable and polished discretions of closed doors and curtained windows”. Mirrors and a carpet replace sky and sea. It is easy to imagine Conrad's friend John Galsworthy, or indeed Henry James himself, utterly at home with this material. The story itself would be enough for them, the small drama of it. But for Conrad, the slightest glance, the smallest passing moment, and words themselves, all came weighted with unfathomable implications, signals to us that time is merely the mercy of eternity.

Writing for him was a way to make this both clear and mysterious, bring it home to us and move it beyond us, just as his wife's return and her pale words make Hervey conscious of matters which perhaps only an exile from English mores and manners could see: “the revealing night... the darkness that tries the hearts, in the night useless for the work of men, but in which their gaze, undazzled by the sunshine of covetous days, wanders sometimes as far as the stars”.