This is by Annabel Abbs. It was published in 2016; it's her first novel; and I came across it via a Five Books recommendation. My audio-version was really well narrated by Leith McPherson, and was a pleasure to listen to.

The subject matter is Lucia (1907-82), the daughter of James Joyce. I'd already encountered her in Edna O'Brien's profile of the famous author, so I knew she had ended up mentally ill. This is the story of how she got there.

The novel has two timelines. One starts in 1934, as we witness Lucia telling her story, drip by painful drip, to psychoanalyst Carl Jung in Kuesnacht, just along the lake from Zurich. The other starts in Paris in 1928, when Lucia's battle began.



You end up feeling terribly sorry for this young woman. As Abbs tells it, Lucia was a talented dancer, who trained with some of the finest of her time, and potentially had a great future ahead of her.

But her career is constantly sabotaged by her parents. For James, she is not just a helper but a clairvoyant and a muse (the degree to which Lucia correctly understands that latter role is a moot point); for Nora, she's a fetcher and carrier, and a permanent irritant.

Every time Lucia gets an opportunity for advancement, her parents need her to do something else, and be somewhere else, and she has no choice but to subordinate her schedule to theirs. Her brother, Giorgio, by contrast, scores plenty of support for his singing career, and a much greater degree of freedom.

For people who in so many ways stood for liberality and progress, the Joyces seemed to allow their daughter surprisingly little latitude (Nora, for example, is never in favour of Lucia's dance career). Throughout (or almost), Lucia remains protective of her father, but is increasingly critical of her mother.

James Joyce is pretty self-absorbed, however. Everything revolves around the genius at the centre of the family. There's not too much room for the needs of the rest.

Nor has there been much in Lucia's life that anyone would call "settled". So many addresses, so many countries, so many languages...

And she feels betrayed when Giorgio, to whom she had been very close, marries Helen Kastor Fleischman, who is 11 years his senior, and was still married when they began their relationship.

Into this already quite trying mix comes serial romantic disappointment. Despite her supposed clairvoyance, Lucia doesn't pick up the signals that the reader/listener clearly perceives from Abbs's text. Samuel Beckett, for example: We can see that he's flaky and commitment-shy (and it's on account of her growing obsession with him that she turns down the talented and wealthy composer who wants to marry her). She's heart-broken when Beckett slopes off, but then falls for the deceptive charms of Cirque Calder inventor Alexander Calder. He's just stringing her along, though, because he has a fiancee elsewhere whom he has no intention of abandoning. Neither time could Lucia say she wasn't warned by more genuinely clear-sighted friends. But she chose to ignore the warnings, partly because she's hoping not only for romantic love, but also for the artistic freedom that she has convinced herself marriage would bring.

Floating around in the back of the story is the suggestion of incest. It's all left fairly open, but we're first teased with the idea it might involve James, and then there's a fuzzy, dreamlike account of an incident with Giorgio.

Lucia's erratic outbursts become more and more marked. And it's terrifying how she quickly ends up in the no-man's-land of psychiatric care, all her rights as an adult suspended.


Joyce and family, Paris, 1924

***

So that's Abbs's account. I feel it could have been slightly condensed, but it was, as I've said, enjoyable, and it felt much more like a "novel" than Claire Berest's Frida.

What of the reality, though? This is always my first question after reading a fictionalized account of someone's life. How much is "true"?

It's hard to know, as Lucia Joyce has been so effectively and tragically buried. Abbs herself gives us the context. Having become aware of Lucia, she turns to a hefty biography written by Carol Loeb Shloss: "The biography was meticulously researched and yet entire swathes of Lucia’s life were unaccounted for. Why? Because most of her letters (to her, from her, about her) had been purposefully destroyed. Her medical records had been burnt. She spent four months in analysis with the legendary Carl Jung in Switzerland. He too had destroyed all his notes. Poems and a novel she’d written had also been lost or destroyed. Lucia’s life seemed to be little more than a few bald facts strung together and viewed through the lens of other people, many of whom seemed entirely unreliable. And yet newspaper reviews (which I quote in the novel) raved about her talent... Joyce’s daughter had been obliterated from history, her voice smothered. I realised that if I wanted to understand and experience her life, I would have to use the facts gleaned from my research -- and imagine the rest. Only a novel was going to give me the emotional truth of Lucia. Only fiction could provide the emotional access to the past I was looking for. To experience her life, both in the intense, claustrophobic Joyce household and colourful, creative, jazz-age Paris needed imagination, not another biography or history book. And, as Doris Lessing famously said, 'There’s no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth'."

The problem, I suppose, is that lack of information plus personal engagement can easily produce an agenda... Abbs continues: "As my research gathered pace, I was horrified to uncover a pattern of young, newly liberated women being carted off to asylums: Lucia’s sister-in-law; her first boyfriend’s sister (who was the first French translator of Joyce’s Dubliners); Zelda, the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (who studied ballet alongside Lucia). All appear in my novel -- and all ended up with diagnoses of schizophrenia. Lucia and Zelda both died in asylums. They had both longed to be professional dancers. They had both, it seemed to me, lived in the shadows of more successful men."

(Zelda Fitzgerald, author of Save Me the Waltz, and subject of a biography by Nancy Milford and a graphic novel by Tiziana Lo Porto and Daniele Marotta, does indeed feature in the novel. She, like Lucia, studied ballet with Lubov Egorova; like Lucia, she started classical ballet a bit too late.)

Abbs continues: "Like Lucia, I grew up with a poet-father who exiled himself in order to pursue his art. The Joyces went to Italy and adopted Italian as their lingua franca. We went to Wales and learned Welsh. Like the Joyces, we lived in relative poverty, moving frequently during the first 10 years of my life."

Again, affinities are revealing, but it's easy to assume your experiences are others' experiences.


Lines from one of Joyce's poems

The Shloss biography was highly controversial. This was partly because of legal battles over the Joyce estate, and partly because of allegations that she made too much out of too little evidence. This New Yorker article, for example, comments: "'This is a story that was not supposed to be told,' Shloss writes. Therefore she tells it with a vengeance... [The] elevation of Lucia to the role of collaborator on Finnegans Wake is the book’s most spectacular act of inflation, but by no means the only one. The less Shloss knows, the more she tells us."

For Shloss, alleges this reviewer, Nora and Giorgio are the enemies -- "especially Giorgio, who, though by this time he spent his days in an alcoholic haze, was always forgiven everything by his family, and who, time and again, was the first person to say that his sister should be put away. Shloss repeatedly suggests -- again, without evidence -- that there may have been some sexual contact between Lucia and Giorgio when they were in their teens or earlier, and that Giorgio, in his rush to institutionalize her, may have been trying to silence her on this subject."

That article sees Shloss's work as part of a tradition -- "the biography-of-the-artist’s-woman" -- whose "goal is to show that many great works of art by men were fed on the blood of women, who were then, at best, forgotten by history or, at worst, maddened by their exploitation and then clapped in an institution". Not that these eye-openers are a bad thing, it goes on, since they serve to point out that "while nature seems to award brilliance equally to men and women, society does not nurture it equally in the two sexes, and thus leaves the women more discourageable. Nor, in females, does the world reward selfishness, which, sad to say, artists seem to need, or so one gathers from the portraits of the men in these books."

Nevertheless, such bios are designed to tell a particular story, and maybe things get left out that don't fit the story.


Paris, 2024

Genevieve Sartor is critical of Abbs's book for the same kinds of reasons: "In reading The Joyce Girl we are supposed to learn something about an abandoned Lucia and the lives of those who raised her. Sadly, this book delivers little that is reliable about either of these subjects." Sartor even declares that Abbs's "depiction of Lucia’s life and the devastation of her mental illness is in conflict with most research on the subject", and particularly takes umbrage at the portrayal of Nora.

The average reader will find it hard to judge these components. But certainly Abbs's article on Nora (emotively entitled "What sort of mother abandons her daughter?") does tend towards the extrapolatory and the speculative.

And Sartor's final volley -- "the problem is Abbs herself does not seem to know where to draw the line between fact and fiction" -- highlights the fuzziness that inevitably surrounds this genre.

Francis Booth, meanwhile, offers us some complementary pictures of Lucia, drawn from contemporary sources (Sylvia Beach: she was "the humorous one"; Kay Boyle: "she was like the high, perishable, wishful tendril of a vine moving blindly up a wall"), and Deirdre Mulrooney provides further testimony that Lucia was really a pretty good dancer.


Lucia Joyce dancing at the Bal Bullier, Paris, 1929, in the mermaid costume she designed and made herself

It is -- as I've said -- hard to judge. Abbs is telling us a story, and it's a good one. Whether it accurately encapsulates Lucia's story I don't know. Biographical novels are slippery things...

Stassa Edwards admits the ultimate elusiveness of Lucia. Piecing together her life ends up as an exercise in tracing lists of doctors and asylums: "Lucia’s life is reduced to asking, 'What was wrong with Lucia Joyce?' That’s the wrong question, of course. There is no answer to that question; it’s too tangled in histories of medicine and gender, too dedicated to the images of insane women. Lucia disappears within those images but the reality of the asylum is that its very purpose is to make women like Lucia disappear."

She concludes: "Even though the history of literature is filled with novels and essays and memoirs about the asylum, many of which were written by women (Virginia Woolf, Leonora Carrington, Sylvia Plath, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, and Alice James), those works are unusual. The author remains decidedly present, decidedly in control of the narrative. Lucia is more typical of how illness and the asylum conspire to render women invisible; how it turns them into ghosts that haunt pages and cultural imaginations. Women like Lucia Joyce are the reason the haunted asylum still holds such cultural sway because hundreds of thousands of women disappeared in these institutions, never to be seen again."

Two of my female ancestors disappeared in exactly that way. I found out the truth about one of them just a few years ago, so carefully had it been hidden away. So, I applaud Abbs's attempt to remind us that such women once had a personality and a life -- in Lucia's case, a bright and vibrant and colourful one -- before the darkness consumed them.