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.
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...
Occupation
Harriet Shaw Weaver
When Marsden considered changing the journal's name, HSW
remarked, I quite like your suggestion of The Egoist.
Lidderdale, Jane, and Mary Nicholson. Dear Miss Weaver. Viking.
75
She then, in December 1913, assembled two shareholders and the directors to vote on the name...
Occupation
Harriet Shaw Weaver
HSW
was fiercely loyal to her writers and their words. She changed printers many times because (fearful of prosecution for obscenity) they raised objections and cut passages. She was also tenacious about obtaining important material...
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...
Occupation
Sylvia Beach
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
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
Harriet Shaw Weaver
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...
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...
Literary responses
Virginia Woolf
VW
wrote to Ethel Smyth
that the stories were diversions or treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
4: 231
An Unwritten Novel, she said, showed her...
Literary responses
Dorothy Richardson
Pilgrimage and its author have been grouped with various other writers and literary methods, particularly with Virginia Woolf
, James Joyce
, and Marcel Proust
, who set out to explore and record linked elements...
Literary responses
Christine Brooke-Rose
Brian McHale
says that CBR
's representations here of London's homeless are freshly observed as if firsthand, and that the novel is in the lineage of the great twentieth-century city novels—a London Wandering Rocks...
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...
Literary responses
Dorothy Richardson
The first reviewer, in the Sunday Observer, found DR
's narrative strategy extraordinary, but remarkably clear. He noted that her leaving the reader without explanations or apologies was not in the least troubling or...
