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.
In November 1915, after Joyce
's novel had been rejected by various publishers, HSW
offered to publish it. But it was difficult for her to find a printer who was not frightened by the prospect...
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...
Occupation
Harriet Shaw Weaver
Writer and suffragist Iris Barry
, summarizing a general admiration for HSW
on the part of Soho writers (Pound, Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Violet Hunt
, and others), coined the phrase, the lion-hearted Miss Weaver who...
Other Life Event
Samuel Beckett
SB
's uncle, by marriage, was not Harry Sinclair but his brother, William A. Sinclair
, father of Beckett's youthful love, Peggy.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (in 2007) calls Harry an uncle of...
politics
Edith Somerville
Perhaps with Ethel Smyth
's encouragement, ES
signed a letter to the newspapers protesting at the mutilation of Joyce
's Ulysses by its American publishers.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
229
Author summary
Harriet Shaw Weaver
HSW
wrote reviews and leaders for the influential little magazine The Egoist while she was its editor. She wrote historical surveys of philosophical concepts of time and space, but neither of these was ever published...
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...
Publishing
Dorothy Richardson
Margaret Anderson
, co-publisher with Jane Heap
of the Little Review, asked to serialise DR
's forthcoming novel (Interim) because she saw Richardson as an experimental writer worthy of publication. Richardson was...
Publishing
Sylvia Beach
Rather than being a historical opus about life in the heyday of Paris, this is an engaging mixture filled with sketchy and witty recollections. When William Bradley
and Alfred Knopf
approached SB
more than...
Publishing
Sylvia Beach
SB
published with Harcourt Brace
the Joyce
portions of her memoirs as a Christmas gift book entitled Ulysses in Paris.
Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. W. W. Norton.
412
Publishing
Virginia Woolf
Half a century after her death, a change in the law brought VW
's works out of copyright (with those of her contemporary James Joyce
); but this change was reversed on 1 January 1996...
Reception
Dorothy Richardson
DR
read and, generally, appreciated the work of these authors. She knew of Joyce
at least by June 1919, when her own Interim began to be seralized in the Little Review (against the advice of...
Reception
Dorothy Richardson
Woolf's private and published statements on Richardson's texts are mixed. In January 1920, she mused in her diary about the danger [of] the damned egotistical self; which ruins Joyce
and Richardson to my mind: is...
Reception
Anne Enright
AE
acknowledges that in this novel you can't escape Dubliners.
Bracken, Claire, and Susan Cahill, editors. “An Interview with Anne Enright, August 2009”. Anne Enright, Irish Academic Press, pp. 13-32.
24
Though Joyce
is a special case, she says, she is always stealing from earlier writers' work, not in mischief or in reverence but...
Reception
Harriet Shaw Weaver
In 1932Eliot
dedicated his Selected Essays to HSW
: in gratitude and in recognition of her services to English letters.
Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver. Viking.
