But you don't need to wait until June to learn more about James Joyce. Here are 12 facts about the man who was as mythical as the myths he used as the foundations for his own work. His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time Where the rude din of this century Can trouble him no more. As an adult, Joyce would publish his first book, a collection of poems called Chamber Music , in It was followed by Dubliners , a collection of short stories, in , and the semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which Clongowes Wood College is prominently featured in By the time Nora Barnacle and Joyce finally married in , they had lived together for 27 years, traveled the continent, and had two children.
The couple first met in Dublin in when Joyce struck up a conversation with her near the hotel where Nora worked as a chambermaid. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me—if you have not forgotten me! She would continue to be his muse throughout their life together in both his published work the character Molly Bloom in Ulysses is based on her and their fruitful personal correspondence.
Joyce suffered from anterior uveitis, which led to a series of around 12 eye surgeries over his lifetime. Due to the relatively unsophisticated state of ophthalmology at the time, and his decision not to listen to contemporary medical advice, scholars speculate that his iritis, glaucoma, and cataracts could have been caused by sarcoidosis, syphilis, tuberculosis, or any number of congenital problems.
His vision issues caused Joyce to wear an eye patch for years and forced him to do his writing on large white sheets of paper using only red crayon. The persistent eye struggles even inspired him to name his daughter Lucia, after St. Lucia, patron saint of the blind.
In , Joyce—eager to get out of Ireland—responded to an ad for a teaching position in Europe. Evelyn Gilford , a job agent based in the British town of Market Rasen, Lincolnshire, notified Joyce that a job was reserved for him and, for two guineas, he would be told exactly where the position was. Joyce sent the money, and by the end of , he and his future wife, Nora, had left Dublin for the job at a Berlitz language school in Zurich, Switzerland—but when they got there, the pair learned there was no open position.
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I wanted to know how it felt to be at the heart of one of the most exciting periods in artistic history. But most of all I wanted to know why she was left, friendless and forgotten, in an English mental asylum for 50 years. What had happened to make her own mother and brother abandon her so ruthlessly? Hoping to find some answers, I turned to a page biography written a decade earlier by an American Joyce scholar called Carol Loeb Schloss.
Because most of her letters to her, from her, about her had been purposefully destroyed. And yet newspaper reviews which I quote in the novel raved about her talent.
I began reading anything I could find on s Paris and the Joyce family. I went to the National Archives and the James Joyce Centres in Zurich and Trieste, trawling through clippings, photographs and previously-censored material.
The more I researched, the angrier I became. I realised that if I wanted to understand and experience her life, I would have to use the facts gleaned from my research — and imagine the rest. Only a novel was going to give me the emotional truth of Lucia.
Only fiction could provide the emotional access to the past I was looking for. To experience her life, both in the intense, claustrophobic Joyce household and colourful, creative, jazz-age Paris needed imagination, not another biography or history book.
All appear in my novel — and all ended up with diagnoses of schizophrenia. Lucia and Zelda both died in asylums. They had both longed to be professional dancers. They had both, it seemed to me, lived in the shadows of more successful men. These young women were also victims of the rapid change sweeping through the developed world. The s was a time of huge change — cars, cameras, telephones and radios were altering the lives of everyone.
In Paris, hems were up and stockings were down as young women embraced change and all it promised. But beneath the glamour and glitter lay a dark underbelly. Today, technology and social media have revolutionised our world and yet beneath the glossy Technicolor of Instagram and Facebook lurks a similarly dark underbelly, with soaring rates of mental health problems among the young. The more I researched, the more I saw parallels between the s and the s — as new generations particularly, but not exclusively, female struggled to adapt to new values, to new ways of behaving and seeing themselves.
Hence I decided to give my first-year profits to a charity called YoungMinds. His novel Ulysses was brought to trial on charges of obscenity being offensive in the United States, but Joyce was found innocent. This marked a breakthrough on how subject matter and language could be used in the modern English novel.
Anderson, Chester G. James Joyce and His World. Beja, Morris. James Joyce: A Literary Life. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, Burgess, Anthony. Re Joyce. New York: Norton, Ellmann, Richard.
New York: Oxford University Press, O'Brien, Edna. New York: Viking Penguin, Toggle navigation. Early fiction Most of Joyce's fiction is autobiographical, that is, it is based on his own life experiences. Ulysses Joyce published Ulysses in
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