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.
EOB
published James Joyce as one of the Penguin
Lives biography series.
O’Brien, Edna. James Joyce. Viking Penguin.
prelims
Education
Edna O'Brien
O'Brien meanwhile cultivated her passion for reading and writing. The first book she purchased was Introducing James Joyce, edited by T. S. Eliot
: this volume, she notes, made me realize that I wanted...
Residence
Edna O'Brien
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edna O'Brien
EOB
's imaginative development was nourished by her wide reading, and consideration of a number of writers helped to shape her own style and vision. She has said in (April 2002) that one learns the...
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...
Literary responses
Edna O'Brien
Jonathan Yardley
, reviewing for the Washington Post, stressed O'Brien's brilliance and her nationality. If what you're looking for is a map of Ireland, the fiction of Edna O'Brien will do just fine. She...
Material Conditions of Writing
Edna O'Brien
When a revival of Joyce
's play, Exiles, was mounted in London in summer 2006, EOB
contributed to the Guardian a spirited account of the play's themes and more particularly of its composition and...
Textual Production
Edna O'Brien
In June 2013 EOB
published with the Greville Press
of Warwick a booklet entitled Joyce
's Women.
EOB
uses books as presiding spirits of her own writing. James Joyce
's image is at one end of the mantelpiece and Samuel Beckett
's at the other. . . . I write by hand...
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
Author summary
Gwen Moffat
Writing from before until after the second half of the twentieth century, GM
has covered a huge span of genres. Having written poetry in youth, she turned to journalism (on outdoor subjects) when short of...
Occupation
Gwen Moffat
After years in the army she found she wanted adventure, freedom, rejection of authority.
Moffat, Gwen. Space Below My Feet. Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Press.
1
A chance acquaintance called Tom, a conscientious objector, introduced her to a bohemian or drop-out lifestyle and to the thrill...
Intertextuality and Influence
Hope Mirrlees
Paris was received by an appreciative audience. Before its publication Virginia Woolf
described it as very obscure, indecent, and brilliant.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
2: 385
As Julia Briggs
observes, its readership remained strictly limited; [but] those, like T. S. Eliot
Reception
Betty Miller
St John Ervine
responded unsympathetically to news of this novel's existence, suggesting that the world had enough novelists already. Aren't there far too many women novelists and not enough good cooks?
Miller, Sarah, and Betty Miller. “Introduction”. On the Side of the Angels, Virago, p. vii - xviii.
