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.
An instalment of DR
's novel Interim was suppressed when the post office seized an issue of the Little Review because it also contained an episode of James Joyce
's Ulysses that was deemed to be obscene.
Fromm, Gloria G. Dorothy Richardson: A Biography. University of Illinois Press.
118
Textual Features
Edna O'Brien
It is a free-association monologue written in the second person, about which EOB
has said, I hope it reads like a little trip to a lucid hallucination.
Eckley, Grace. Edna O’Brien. Bucknell University Press.
35
Grace Eckley
draws similarities between O'Brien's narrative...
Textual Features
Edna O'Brien
This text consists of a long soliloquy by Mary Hooligan, a middle-aged woman who speaks from her four-poster bed in a London flat. Her self-reliance and immersion in memory, both positve and negative, help her...
Textual Features
Katharine Tynan
She limited her selection to Irish lyrical poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, excluding political poems and poems either derived from English or already well-known to English audiences. Her wide range of poets included...
Textual Features
Sylvia Beach
The memoir reads like a homage to the men and women who enriched her life personally, and the world of letters generally. SB
's generosity and goodwill made her censor much about her difficulties with...
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...
Textual Features
Samuel Beckett
The publisher's blurb, talking about a new independent spirit at work and humour, the last weapon against despair, was remarkably percipient.
Federman, Raymond, and John Fletcher. Samuel Beckett. University of California Press.
13
Like Beckett's other early prose works in English, these stories are deeply Joycean
Textual Features
Caroline Norton
The Rebel, spoken by an imprisoned Irish harper who weep[s,] to think upon my country's chain, suggests both a sympathy with the cause of Ireland and the influence of CN
's friend Thomas Moore
Textual Features
Dodie Smith
The book is narrated in the first person by seventeen-year-old Cassandra, a budding writer. As she explains, I am writing this journal partly to practise my newly acquired speed-writing and partly to teach myself how...
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...
Textual Features
Seamus Heaney
The title poem, wrote a critic some years later, wrestled towards a vision of poetic transcendence in the person of James Joyce
,
Her cluttered writing room has an arbutus desk, books (many of them signed gifts from their authors), candles, paintings, the faded and fraying tapesty carpet, and images of James Joyce
and Samuel Beckett
presiding at...
Residence
Bryher
Shari Benstock
explains that the very wealthy Bryher had been advised to move to Switzerland for tax purposes. But Benstock also suggests that Bryher's Swiss home became a creative refuge for her and H. D...
Residence
Harriet Shaw Weaver
In May 1934, faulty wiring in the flat below hers caused an electrical fire in the building. HSW
's first editions were protected by her glass-fronted bookcase, but other precious books and mementoes such as...
Residence
Seamus Heaney
In Dublin SH
bought a house by a famous strand, that is, close to Sandymount, which features in a famous early scene in James Joyce
's Ulysses.
