Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake

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.