This title concerns the remarkable life of James Joyce's only daughter."Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and it has
kindled a fire in her brain" James Joyce, 1934 Most accounts of James Joyce's
family portray Lucia Joyce as the mad daughter of a man of genius, a difficult
burden. But Carol Loeb Shloss reveals a different and more dramatic truth:
Joyce loved Lucia and they shared a deep creative bond. Lucia was born in a
pauper's hospital and educated haphazardly across Europe as her penniless
father pursued his art. She wanted to strike out on her own and in her twenties
emerged, to Joyce's amazement, as a harbinger of expressive modern dance in
Paris. Lucia was a child of the imaginative realms her father created, and even
after emotional turmoil wrought havoc with her and she was hospitalised in the
1930s he saw in her a life lived in tandem with his own. Though most of the
documents about Lucia have been destroyed, in this important book Shloss
painstakingly reconstructs the poignant complexities of her life.
