Joyce, Lucia | "... A few lines from a sick friend ..."

Lucia Joyce

As small archive of correspondence from Lucia Joyce to Lucie Léon, with news of the Joyce family, and her father's friends, 1959-70

27 autograph letters signed 8vo. Approximately 88 pages in total, 8vo., with 22 with autograph envelopes, St Andrew's Hospital, Northampton, 6 May 1959 to 30 June 1970.— [With:] One earlier letter by Lucia to the same correspondent, "...All nice things have gone and all bad things also. I sometimes think of you and I think that I would have liked to resemble you. To be active all day a beautiful woman an intelligent woman and a woman with a heart I am sure...", in pencil, 3 pages, 8vo, Les Rives de Prangins, Nyon, 20 August 1934. — [With:] Photocopy of another letter by Lucia to the same correspondent, 17 January 1970.

"...A few lines from a sick friend..."

A substantial series of letters by Lucia Joyce during her later years, with news of the Joyce family, her father's friends and supporters, and repeated references to Samuel Beckett ("...I had a nice letter from Mr Beckett I suppose you know him...", 18 April 1966).

James Joyce's daughter had begun to show signs of mental illness in 1930, soon after she abandoned her career as a professional dancer. She underwent treatment in Zurich—including analysis with Carl Jung—and first visited St Andrew's Hospital for Mental Diseases (as it was then called) in Northampton in 1936. She spent the remainder of her life in institutions, and was an inpatient at St Andrew's from 1951 until her death in 1982. These letters were written to Lucie, the widow of Paul Léon. She and her husband had been very close friends with the Joyce family, and Paul had worked as Joyce's secretary. They were torn apart by the War and the fall of France, and Paul Léon was murdered in a German camp in 1942.

These letters reveal Lucia's continuing but attenuated links with her father's circle. An early letter from 1959 reveals, strikingly, that she was then reading Ulysses, seemingly for the first time: "I received a copy of Ulysses from Miss Beach from America and I am trying to read it. It is very exciting and I like it very much" (6 May 1959). In another letter, she asks for a copy of Exiles. Samuel Beckett, with whom she had been in love in the late 1920s, features frequently in her letters ("...Mr Beckett was to come over to London but I am not sure..."), and they also include references to Sylvia Beach ("...Miss Beach told me a lot about Alexis...", 11 August 1960), Harriet Weaver ("...She was very kind and good to me..."), Maria Jolas, and others.

Lucia also wrote with news of her family, including her brother, relatives in Ireland, and her only nephew ("...Stephen has a good job in Dakar Sénégal now he says the people are very friendly..."). Lucia's own life was of course heavily circumscribed. She writes on 6 May 1959 that "I am well treated here but the nurses are rather strict and there are too many. We go for walks in the morning and I play the piano but I have no music unfortunately," and she occupied the hours with activities such as sewing, knitting, and local coach trips. "I am getting rather tired of being in England", she writes in the same letter of May 1959, "and I miss 'La dance France' very much."

An extraordinary collection of correspondence.