Eveline (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Born February 2, 1882, in Dublin, Ireland, Joyce was the eldest of ten children in a family that went from prosperity to poverty in a short time. He attended two private Jesuit schools, and the religion he learned there influenced much of his writing. Joyce graduated in 1902 with a degree in modern languages from University College, Dublin, and then left for Paris to study medicine but instead spent his time writing. He returned to Dublin in 1903 because his mother was fatally ill. It was also during this time that Joyce began a lifelong relationship with Nora Barnacle, whom he married in 1931.

By the time Joyce brought Nora with him to continental Europe, he had already begun work on some of the short stories for Dubliners. In 1905, Joyce submitted the first version of this collection, including "Eveline," to the English publisher Grant Richards. Richards was afraid the stories were too controversial, however, and did not actually publish them until nine years later. In the meantime, while living mostly in Trieste (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Joyce published a book of poetry titled Chamber Music, fathered two children, and worked on a semi-autobiographical novel called Stephen Hero, which he ultimately discarded, turning its subject into an entirely new work that became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This novel, which helped define the form of European modernism, was published serially between 1914 and 1915 in Ezra Pound's Egoist magazine and was published in book form in 1916.

With the onset of World War I, Joyce and his family moved to Zurich, in politically neutral Switzerland, where they stayed until briefly moving back to Trieste after the war. They then moved to Paris to better negotiate the publication of what would become one of the most important novels of the century, Ulysses. This novel is a heavily allusive text following the lives of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through Dublin in the course of a single day. Joyce had begun work on the novel while in Switzerland, and its first edition was published in 1922 in Paris.

By 1922, Joyce had already earned international fame, but he began to suffer from severe eye troubles and was distraught at his daughter's mental illness, which ultimately led to her institutionalization. For the next seventeen years, Joyce worked on his final book, Finnegan's Wake (1939), which examines a huge canvas of issues in Western civilization and employs a completely new approach to language. He moved to unoccupied France during World War II. Joyce died January 13, 1941, shortly after he and his family had returned to Zurich.