Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (Hardcover)

~ Carol Loeb Shloss (Author) "The story begins with the birth of a girl child in a pauper's hospital..." (more)
Key Phrases: famous trunk, physical culture movement, unpublished typescript, Harriet Weaver, Miss Weaver, Finnegans Wake (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author of this groundbreaking new study of the life of Lucia Joyce (1907-1982), the daughter of James Joyce, shares an artistic sensibility with her subject that gives her a special insight for viewing Lucia's life. The origin of Lucia's mental breakdown, Shloss speculates, was her family's decision that she must give up her promising and fulfilling career in modern dance, an art form that Shloss explores with deep empathy. Lucia, she shows, was an artist, "who worked with a fervor and vision comparable to Joyce's own." Deprived of the creative expression that gave her life meaning, yanked from one country to another by her perpetually penurious father and buffeted by a series of emotional crises-her abandonment by several men she loved, including Samuel Beckett and Alexander Calder-Lucia's volatile and sometimes violent behavior resulted in her lifelong incarceration in mental institutions. Shloss further speculates that Joyce came to understand his role in his daughter's mental illness, and that he tried until his untimely death to reunite Lucia with her family-even though his wife, Nora, would not allow Lucia in her home and Giorgio, Lucia's untalented, parasitical brother, insisted that Lucia remain behind institutional bars. Shloss's assiduous research has turned up numerous facts about Lucia's medical and psychiatric history that contradict what other biographers have said; she takes issue with Richard Ellmann, Jane Lidderdale and Brenda Maddox for accepting versions of Lucia's life from unreliable sources. She criticizes Ellmann in particular for deviating from the historical method in his decision to trust the words of Maria Jolas, a family friend whose version of events was colored by her dislike of Lucia. Shloss's research reveals information about the various psychiatrists (including Jung) who used Lucia as human guinea pig to test psychological and physiological theories, all later disproved; it makes painful reading. Even more provocatively, Shloss states that Lucia was her father's muse, that she was aware of her role and that she was both proprietary of her place in her father's creativity and resentful that she was forced to abandon her own attempts at artistic expression. In Shloss's cogent analysis, the character of Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake reflected Joyce's steadfast love for and festering guilt about his daughter, who he truly believed was a genius in her own right. Deeply and intuitively familiar with Joyce's work, Shloss speculates that Finnegans Wake is "an elaborate coded mystery of an actual family." Since most of Lucia's letters have been destroyed, as Shloss acknowledges, she has been forced to imagine Lucia through the eyes of those who knew her and from her medical records. Because it is speculative in many areas where no direct material survives, this study will surely arouse debate, as Shloss admits. Because it is so astutely reasoned, however, it will surely stand as a vivid testament to Lucia's talents as a creative artist, as well as a corrective to the ways that the facts of her life have been hidden and distorted by earlier Joyce scholars.
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Review

"Inventive and resourceful . . . [Shloss] has managed to paint a remarkably detailed portrait of Joyce’s unfortunate ‘Lucylight.'" -- John Banville, The New York Review of Books

"Shloss gives us a James Joyce we have never seen before . . . both the great writer . . . and the desperate, doting father." -- Lev Grossman, Time Magazine

"Shloss’s work takes its place as an important contribution to Joyceana." -- J. Johnson, The Christian Science Monitor

The virtues of Lucia Joyce are considerable, and its existence is a testament to heroic effort. -- William S. Kowinski, San Francisco Chronicle

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (December 10, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374194246
• ISBN-13: 978-0374194246
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,217,810 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Her proper place in her father's story, June 14, 2006

By	Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake (Paperback)

This review is based in good part on Joan Acocella 's comprehensive review which first appeared in 'The New Yorker'. It also makes use of information provided by D.T. Max in a story on Joyce's grandson , Stephen Joyce and his efforts to protect the family from too close public scrutiny.
Shloss worked for many years on this book, and her aim is to both rehabilitate Lucia Joyce from the image given of her by Joyce scholars Richard Ellmann( The great Joyce biographer) and Brenda Maddox( Biographer of Nora Joyce).
As Schloss sees it Lucia Joyce was herself a creative artist who was not simply an inspiration but a real collaborator with her father in the creation of 'Finnegan's Wake'. This claim is one Acocella believes there is no real evidence for, and is in fact the major exaggeration of the book.
Other claims of Schloss however are given greater credibility. The primary one is that Lucia Joyce was victimized, institutionalized unnecessarily through the treacherous actions of her brother Georgio. As Schloss sees it James Joyce was Lucia's defender in the family , loved her and believed in her genius. But in his dedication to his work, especially to the completion of 'Finnegan's Wake' he did not take the time and effort to stand up to his wife Nora and son Georgio who worked against Lucia.
Lucia's sad story, her schizophrenia, her rejection by three assistants of Joyce, including Beckett and Alexander Calder, her failed efforts at a dancing career, her tale of childhood wanderings with an indigent father artist, her language difficulties , her long period of institutionalization is told here in great detail.
Schloss has tremendous sympathy for her subject.
Unfortunately she in trying to make Lucia Joyce a subject of interest is unable to change the fact that the reason most people have had or will have interest in her is because of the possible light her life throws on that of Joyce itself.
Certainly the illness of his daughter was for Joyce a major source of worry grief and frustration.
Yet in the way Schloss tells the story Joyce himself too appears a victim, both of his other family members, and of his genius.
He also appears as an often neglectful but nonetheless largely caring father who could not prevent his child from having a life of great pain and suffering.

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars this is what you get when you tear up letters on a biographer., December 30, 2008

By	edi "the last slum goddess" (Second Floor, Elswise Abandoned Industrial Wasteland, LA, CA USofA) - See all my reviews

ibid.

i wanted to like this book, its author bears somewhat of a resemblance to my mother [&, in fact, could be a somewhat distant relative].

but it's a =novel=, based on real persons & the occasional real event, all cooked up w/ a whole lotta holy helluvan author's emotional imagination.

i can do no better than--in fact, less than half as well as--the joan acocella review previously cited, published 081203 in the new yorker.

& now available online. i urge the reader to seek it out. [abovenoted title is an excellent tagline for the book & arrives hereupon via the avenue of the equally abovenoted review.]