Volume 51, Number 6 · April 8, 2004
The Sacrifice
By John Banville
Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake
by Carol Loeb Shloss
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 560 pp., $30.00
The life of Lucia Joyce, so Carol Loeb Shloss tells us, 'is a story that was not supposed to be told.' In her attempts to recount the tale of James Joyce's troubled daughter, Shloss met many obstacles, chief among them, she implies, the remaining members of the immediate Joyce family, and particularly Joyce's grandson, Stephen, 'the very person who...decided that [Lucia's] story should remain buried in the dark cellars of 'family privacy.'' It was Stephen Joyce who in 1992 persuaded the National Library of Ireland to allow him to remove from the James Joyce–Paul Léon papers, which were about to be opened to the public, a substantial number of letters relating to his aunt. Already Stephen Joyce had destroyed Lucia's letters to him, and had persuaded Samuel Beckett to do likewise.
Review, 3562 words
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