Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake Paperback - 2005

First line

The story begins with the birth of a girl child in a pauper's hospital.

From the rear cover

In this ground breaking work Carol Shloss shows the extraordinary influence that James Joyce's daughter Lucia exercised on her father's emotions and work. "This is a story that was not supposed to be told", writes Shloss who transforms Lucia from the "mad daughter", and a footnote in her father's life, to a creative kindred spirit.

"Shloss's patient research expands what could have been a footnote in literary history into a tragedy of wasted promise. Shloss gives us a James Joyce we have never seen before."--Time

"[Carol Loeb Shloss] argues that not only was Lucia an extraordinary artist in her own right, she was also central to the creation of Finnegans Wake....Joyce scholars say that Ms. Shloss's work is important because Lucia was pivotal to Joyce's work."--The New York Times

"A sharply perceptive and disturbing meditation on the terrible price that great art often levies not only on the artist but on those closest to him....Lucia Joyce's story, which Shloss tells so movingly, not only wrings the heart but stirs one's anger."--John Banville, The New York Review of Books

"The most impressive feature of her book is the delicacy with which it handles the complex ambiguities of the Joyce-Lucia relationship....Shloss argues persuasively that the conclusion of Finnegan's Wake pays homage to Lucia, as Joyce poignantly seeks to make amends to his beloved daughter and convince her that all may still be well."--Terry Eagleton, London Review of Books

Carol Loeb Shloss is an Acting Professor at Stanford University. She has written extensively on Joyce and other modernists. She divides her time between Stanford, California and the coast of Maine.

Media reviews

Citations

• New York Times, 05/08/2005, Page 28