A highly-charged erotic letter from James Joyce to his lover Nora Barnacle set a world record at Sotheby's in London yesterday where it sold for a staggering £240,800.
All but three of 30 lots in a collection once owned by Joyce's brother Stanislaus were sold for a total of £721,620 - almost £300,000 more than anticipated.
And the sale, attended by major collectors from America, Ireland and Britain, witnessed a second record set when a newly-discovered and previously unrecorded copy of the original 1916 Proclamation printed at Liberty Hall in Dublin on Easter Sunday was bought for £123,200.
The anonymous buyer of the Joyce letter - "a torrential outpouring of sexual imagery and feeling" - paid more than four times its original high estimate, so setting what Sotheby's confirmed was a world auction record for a 20th century letter in English.
The letter - tucked away between the pages of a book, thought lost and previously unseen by all Joyce scholars - has been described as "the missing link in the most famous erotic correspondence in modern world literature."
Written during their second separation in December 1909, the exchange of highly-explicit letters - described by Edna O'Brien as a "scalding marathon" - was famously initiated by Nora either in a moment of extreme desire or perhaps "in a determination to keep (Joyce) excited and faithful to her in his absence".
In the newly-discovered letter, Joyce writes to Nora describing a sexual encounter similar to their first on June 16th, 1904, (later immortalised by Joyce as the day on which Ulysses is set) when she had taken him to Ringsend, opened his trousers and "made a man of him".
Written from his father's house in Fontenoy Street, "his glands in a pandemonium", the letter testifies to Joyce's "ungovernable lust" (as he describes it) and his sexually intoxicated state as he describes how he wishes to satisfy his and Nora's expressed desire.
The following day he wrote again to his beloved Nora wondering whether he should apologise for "the extraordinary letter I wrote you last night".
Yesterday's collection of items once owned by Stanislaus, and thought to have been offered for sale by his daughter-in-law, included a presentation copy of Ulysses inscribed by "Jim" to "Stannie" which was bought for £112,000.
Joyce's grandson and literary executor, Mr Stephen Joyce, has made it clear he will not permit the publication of this correspondence to Nora, the sale of which he considers an invasion of privacy.