Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
James Joyce
-
Standard Name: Joyce, James
Irish exile JJ
, hailed by Yeats
as a new kind of novelist even before his first novel was published, became one of the leading practitioners of modernism. As well as poems, a play, and a volume of short stories, he produced three important novels, from the last of which he put out several separate sections long before the whole appeared. Joyce encountered obstacles to publishing almost all his books, raised by censors both official and self-appointed. Without the tireless patronage of Harriet Shaw Weaver
and Sylvia Beach
, his last two books might never have been published at all.
Her parents named her after Anna Livia Plurabelle of Joyce
's Finnegans Wake, and after Julian of Norwich
, medieval anchoress and author of Revelations of Divine Love.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
Textual Production
Anna Livia
In this text Anna Livia
explores the growth and survival of lesbian identities and communities through the politics of gender, sexuality, class, and race. The narrative is set in contemparary South London and centres on...
Literary responses
Anna Livia
In American Book Review, John Jacob
commented that Minimax was a novel James Joyce
would have shown an interest in . . . [Anna Livia] has infused her writing with . . . inventiveness...
Textual Features
Diana Athill
Many aspects of this story are clearly close to the way DA
saw her own life, though characters are different (the protagonists' parents, for instance, are not her own). Sixteen-year-old Meg Bailey is shy, easily...
Friends, Associates
Djuna Barnes
DB
arrived in Paris with letters of introduction to Ezra Pound
and James Joyce
, and she soon came into contact with a great number of the US expatriates living there at this time, including...
Mathews, Jackson, and Maurice Saillet. Sylvia Beach 1887-1962. Mercure de France.
cover and prelims
Textual Features
Sylvia Beach
Reviewing the collection, Kathryn Hughes
found SB
's usual style characterised by a kind of polite chirpiness, with even faintly slangy expressions—jazzed up, my stars, corking—marked by scare quotes, and Beach's...
Family and Intimate relationships
Sylvia Beach
SB
was hunting down a copy of Paul Fort
's Vers et prose, and was directed to Monnier's bookshop. She found the shop's owner surprisingly warm and friendly. Adrienne declared that she like[d] America...
Occupation
Sylvia Beach
This was the first American bookstore in Paris. It became a focal point of French and American literary activities. In the summer of 1921 the bookstore moved to 12 rue de l'Odéon.
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace.
60
For...
Wealth and Poverty
Sylvia Beach
Eleanor Beach
fully supported her daughter's dream of owning a bookstore. She worked with her broker to get SB
the necessary $3,000 (24,810 francs) in August 1919 in order to start the business.
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
Joyce
was having trouble getting his latest work, Ulysses, published because of the public outcry against it and the obscenity laws that penalized both the printer and the publisher of material deemed obscene. Harriet Weaver
Friends, Associates
Sylvia Beach
Beach and Joyce
had a bet to see whether Bernard Shaw
would purchase a copy of Ulysses. Beach lost when Shaw wrote to say that she knew little of [his] countrymen if she thought...
Occupation
Sylvia Beach
Harassed by customers and friends for their copies, SB
withdrew the window-copy until shipments arrived from the publisher
in Dijon. She and her assistant mailed out the books to subscribers in the United States...
Occupation
Sylvia Beach
Joyce
wanted a simple, cheap-looking booklet, so Herbert Clarke
produced something that looked, even Clarke himself thought, regrettably pharmaceutical.
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. Harcourt, Brace.
174
Clarke persuaded Beach to put out a better version with boards, but this would...
Timeline
11 January 1904: Father John Creagh began a series of fiery...
Building item
11 January 1904
Father John Creagh
began a series of fiery antisemitic sermons in Limerick, which provoked a pogrom.
2 July 1914: The first issue of the magazine Blast, edited...
Building item
2 July 1914
The first issue of the magazine Blast, edited by Wyndham Lewis
, formally announced the arrival of Vorticism, an avant-garde movement in art.
December 1919: The last issue of The Egoist: An Individualist...
Writing climate item
December 1919
The last issue of The Egoist: An Individualist Review was published.
1926: Soon after Chatto and Windus published The...
4 December 1931: The BBC announced the resignation of Hilda...
Writing climate item
4 December 1931
The BBC
announced the resignation of Hilda Matheson
, its director of talks, which she had actually submitted in October. This was the climax of a long-running struggle over a series of talks by Harold Nicolson
1946: Critic Erich Auerbach published, in German,...
Writing climate item
1946
Critic Erich Auerbach
published, in German, the influential study which became in its English translation, 1953, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. He wrote it at Istanbul, as a Jewish refugee...
By late October 1975: The short-story volume Angels at the Ritz,...
Writing climate item
By late October 1975
The short-story volume Angels at the Ritz, by expatriate Irish writer William Trevor (born Trevor Cox
in 1928), was hailed by Graham Greene
as probably the best collection of stories since Joyce
's Dubliners.
October 1996: Irish journalist and writer Nuala O'Faolain...
Writing climate item
October 1996
Irish journalist and writer Nuala O'Faolain
published her autobiography Are You Somebody? The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman.
22 January 2008: Day, the fifth novel by Scottish author,...
Women writers item
22 January 2008
Day, the fifth novel by Scottish author, playwright and stand-up comedian A. L. Kennedy
(whose unmentioned first name is Alison), won the 2007 Costa (formerly Whitbread) Book of the Year prize.
Texts
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Egoist, 1917.
Joyce, James. Chamber Music. Elkin Mathews, 1907.
Joyce, James. Dubliners. Grant Richards, 1914.
Joyce, James. Exiles. Grant Richards, 1918.
Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. Faber and Faber, 1939.
Joyce, James. Pomes Penyeach. Shakespeare and Company, 1927.
Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. J. Cape, 1944.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Shakespeare and Company, 1922.
