Lucia Joyce

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lucia Anna Joyce (July 26, 1907 - December 12, 1982), daughter of Irish writer James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, was born in Trieste. Italian was her first language and the language in which she corresponded with her father. She studied ballet while she was a teenager, becoming good enough to train with Isadora Duncan. She started to show signs of mental illness in 1930, around the time she began casually dating Samuel Beckett. Her deteriorating mental state caused him to call off the relationship, and in 1934, Carl Jung took her in as a patient. Soon after, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich. She died in St Andrew's Hospital in Northampton, England.

Her mental state, and documentation pertaining thereto, is the subject of a recent study by Carol Shloss, who believes Lucia to have been her father's muse for Finnegans Wake. The study makes heavy reference to the letters between Lucia Joyce and her father, and became the subject of a copyright misuse suit by the James Joyce estate. On March 25, 2007, this litigation was resolved.^[1]^[2]

[edit] References

Shloss, Carol Loeb. Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake. Farrar, Straus, and Girous, New York, 2003. ISBN 0-374-19424-6.
Patry, William (2006), "The Patry Copyright Blog: Copyright's Wake". Retrieved June 13, 2006. (concerning research done on Lucia as Joyce's muse)