Lucia Joyce was the only daughter of James Joyce, the author of Ulysses and one of the most influential literary figures of the interwar period. She was a noted beauty and a gifted dancer whose career was just beginning to flourish when her mental health collapsed in the 1930s. From that point on, she spent more than fifty years confined to asylums, and after her death her own family worked to erase every trace of her existence. Lucia Anna Joyce was born on the 26th of July 1907 in Trieste, a port city on the Adriatic Sea in the northeast of the Kingdom of Italy, near the border with the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Her father was an Irishman who had become one of the most significant writers in Europe, the author of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man before achieving fame with Ulysses. Her mother, Nora Barnacle, came from a poor family in Galway in the west of Ireland but had moved to Dublin as a child. She met Joyce in 1904, and although his works were almost always set in Dublin, the couple left Ireland within months and never returned for any sustained period. They settled in Trieste, where their son Giorgio was born in 1905 and Lucia followed two years later.
After a miscarriage in 1908, Nora had no more children. In those early years the family lived a precarious existence. Joyce was not yet an established writer, and they depended on small bequests from patrons who believed in his potential. When Lucia was born, Joyce was recovering from rheumatic fever that had incapacitated him for weeks and briefly drove him to give up alcohol, which he consumed heavily for most of his life.
Lucia was too young to remember her first years in Trieste. Her formative years in the 1910s were spent as part of an itinerant literary family. The Joyces briefly returned to Ireland in the early 1910s when James attempted to secure a teaching position at University College Dublin, but when that failed they went back to Trieste. He found some success with the publication of Dubliners, but the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914 made living in the Austro-Italian border town increasingly hazardous.
After Italy entered the war against Austria-Hungary in May 1915, the Joyces left Trieste for Zurich in neutral Switzerland, where they remained until the war ended before briefly returning to Trieste again. The constant moving left its mark on the family. By the time Lucia was entering her teenage years, she had developed a strange relationship with her parents, particularly her mother. She grew up multicultural, and despite her Irish parentage, she considered Italian her first language.
Another peculiar feature of her upbringing was that her parents were not actually married, an unusual arrangement in the early twentieth century. They would only finally marry in a London registry office in 1931. In 1920 the family moved to Paris, where they settled for the next twenty years. These were the years of the “crazy years” in the French capital, a time of great economic growth and cultural revival after the trauma of the First World War and the Spanish flu epidemic.
Writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein made the city their home for periods of time, and with the publication of Ulysses in serialized form, Lucia’s father emerged as one of the most prominent writers of the era. The Joyce home became a gathering place for many famous literary and cultural figures, and Lucia grew up around people such as Pablo Picasso, Ford Madox Ford, Hemingway, and the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. Much of her energy in her early adult years was channeled into dance.
Lucia began dancing in 1922 at the age of fifteen at the Dalcroze Institute, but it was not until 1925, near her eighteenth birthday, that she began training seriously. Her family’s position in the cultural world of Paris gave her access to some of the leading ballet and contemporary dance instructors of the day, including Raymond Duncan, a dance instructor and artist who was the brother of the more famous Isadora Duncan, a pioneer of contemporary dance. Lucia also trained under Margaret Morris, an English dance pioneer known for introducing Celtic and Scottish elements into contemporary dance. There was no doubt that she was talented.
By 1928 she was accepted into a dance troupe called Les Six, which performed in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin the following year. In 1929 she was runner-up at the first International Festival of Dance held in Paris. After witnessing one of her performances, a writer for the Paris Times remarked that Lucia Joyce was her father’s daughter, possessing James Joyce’s enthusiasm, energy, and a not yet determined amount of his genius. The writer suggested that when she reached her full capacity for rhythmic dancing, James Joyce might yet be known as his daughter’s father.
Just as her career was taking off, it came to a sudden halt. In late 1929, Lucia abruptly abandoned dancing, telling friends she was not physically strong enough to continue. The exact reasons for her decision have been a matter of considerable debate. Some historians have suggested that her father put a stop to her career, apparently believing that dancing was too physically demanding and causing her great stress.
The decision worsened the already difficult relationship between Lucia and her mother. Around this time, she began a relationship with Samuel Beckett, an Irish writer living in Paris who was briefly her father’s secretary and who would later win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. The relationship was short-lived. Beckett was involved with another woman and told Lucia that he was more interested in her father and his writing than in her.
Her decision to quit dancing combined with the collapse of the relationship led to a dramatic decline in her mental health. In 1930, Joyce wrote to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver that this had led to a month of tears, as Lucia thought she had thrown away three or four years of hard work and was sacrificing a talent. Things deteriorated further in the early 1930s. The exact nature of her illness is a point of contention, though there appear to have been elements of schizophrenia involved.
At one point she was sent to Switzerland, where she spent time at the Burghölzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich, treated for a time by Carl Jung, the great psychoanalyst who had trained under Sigmund Freud and later emerged as his rival. These were strained years, with Lucia often suffering from violent outbursts directed at her family, particularly her mother. Her deteriorating psychological state came to a head in 1935 during a visit to relatives in Bray, south of Dublin in Ireland. During the holiday, she lit a fire in the middle of the living room of her cousin’s home and tried to unbutton the trousers of several male visitors.
She was also known to open the gas tap at night, flooding the house with fumes until someone awoke and turned it off. She then disappeared from Bray altogether and went to Dublin, where she spent nearly a week sleeping in doorways. When she returned to Paris and her parents learned the full extent of what had occurred, they decided to have her committed to an asylum at Ivry-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of the French capital. Lucia would spend most of the next fifteen years at Ivry, though she was sent for a time to St Andrew’s Hospital in Britain for assessment.
Her father and brother Giorgio would visit her on Sundays for the next several years, but there is no record that her mother ever saw her again after she was committed. James was evidently deeply troubled by her condition, and the character of Mamie in his 1939 novel Finnegans Wake is likely based to some extent on Lucia. The visits stopped in the summer of 1940, when the Joyces fled Paris in the wake of the Nazi invasion of France and settled in Zurich in Switzerland. James died there just six months later.
Lucia’s mother lived for another decade in the Swiss city before her own death in 1951. Lucia was transferred from Ivry to St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, England, where she had been examined back in the mid-1930s. She would spend the rest of her life there. This was done at the request of Harriet Shaw Weaver, the English political activist and literary figure who had patronized her father in years gone by and who agreed to become Lucia’s guardian in 1951 following the death of her mother.
Lucia often had visits from friends and acquaintances who had known the Joyce family in the 1920s and 1930s. Chief among them was Samuel Beckett, her former suitor from the early 1930s and her father’s close literary acquaintance. By then Beckett was a successful author himself, and when Weaver died in 1961, he financed Lucia’s continuing care at Northampton. Her brother Giorgio only visited her once, in 1967.
Lucia Joyce died from complications arising from a stroke on the 12th of December 1982, aged seventy-five. She was the last surviving member of her family, Giorgio having died six years earlier. Following her death, her nephew Stephen took most of her writing and destroyed it, including her correspondence with her father and apparently some poetry and a novel she had written. Her medical records were burnt, and Carl Jung had also destroyed all his notes relating to his time with Lucia.
Friends and acquaintances of the Joyce family were encouraged to destroy any correspondence involving Lucia, as if she had never existed. She was buried in Kinnear Cemetery in St Andrews, where a ceremony near her grave is held each year on Bloomsday, the festival celebrating her father’s greatest work, Ulysses. Plans have been brought up in recent years to repatriate the Joyce family’s remains to Ireland, while several books have appeared reclaiming Lucia’s story from obscurity.