John Stanislaus Joyce: The Voluminous Life and Genius of James Joyce’s Father - Softcover

Wyse Jackson, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007291957 ISBN 13: 9780007291953

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2008

Synopsis

The life of John Stanislaus Joyce, father of James, Fenian, Parnellite, drunk who claimed to have cured himself of syphilis.

Obsessed with the burden of being the only son of an only son, John Joyce himself

fathered no fewer than seventeen children with his long-suffering wife (despite many affairs and many engagements he actually married only once) but was concerned only with his eldest surviving son, James. This was through no intrinsic merit on James’s part but because of John Joyce’s excessive belief in the rights of primogeniture such that all his other children were excluded from his will and those who predeceased him were not even named on the family gravestone. John, as James liked to claim, gave to his son all of his wit: most of the characters in Ulysses are barely disguised friends of his and the incidents from his life pepper James’s fiction. John Joyce was the most important person in James’s life. But as well as the light thrown on the century’s greatest novelist, this is a depiction of the high-spirits, ebulliant passions, deep depressions, good humour and warm linguistic skills of the ultimate Dublin character.

About this title

Review:

‘A vivid portrait.’
Brenda Maddox, author of NOra: The Biography of Nora Joyce

‘The old rogue is good company.’
Scotsman

‘A rich chronicle - and one set for much re-reading.’
Irish Independent

‘Genuinely visionary.’
The Times

‘An exuberant account.’
Sunday Times

About the Author:

John Wyse Jackson is a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, and author of James Joyce’s Dubliners: An Annotated Edition and The Uncollected Oscar Wilde.

About this edition

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0007291957
• ISBN 13: 9780007291953
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 528