Lucia Joyce

Diagnoses

Vocation

Italian-Irish dancer, the daughter of Irish writer James Joyce and his wife and muse Nora Barnacle. Italian was Lucia's first language and the language in which she corresponded with her father. She studied ballet while she was a teenager, becoming good enough to train with Isadora Duncan. She started to show signs of mental illness in 1930, around the time she began casually dating Samuel Beckett. Her deteriorating mental state caused him to call off the relationship, and in 1934, Carl Jung took her in as a patient. Soon after, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich. She was placed in an institution in Ivry-sur-Seine, France, in 1935. In 1951 Lucia was sent to St Andrew's Hospital in Northampton, England, where she was visited at times by Beckett. She died at the institution aged 75 on 12 December 1982. A study by Carol Shloss claims Lucia to have been her father's muse for his novel Finnegans Wake. The study makes heavy reference to the letters between Lucia Joyce and her father, and became the subject of a copyright misuse suit by the James Joyce estate. On 25 March 2007, this litigation was resolved. Her life was the subject in 2004 of a West End play, Calico, written by Michael Hastings, and in the 2012 graphic novel, Dotter of Her Father's Eyes. Link to Wikipedia biography