Sir, – Tills will tintinnabulate and straw hats tilt precariously as Joyceans celebrate another Bloomsday. But, will anyone toast the most important woman in Joyce’s life? His mother, Mary Jane, from whom he inherited his love of music. And who pawned precious jewellery to help him when he was stranded in Paris.
Weary from multiple births and the antics of her husband, John Stanislaus, she died on August 13th, 1903 aged 44.
When will some biographer relate Mary Jane’s long overdue story?
– Yours, etc,
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BRENDAN LYNCH,
Dublin 7.
Sir, – The difficulties reported by John McCourt (“Celebrating James Joyce as a local and global figure”, Books, June 11th) of trying to buy James Joyce’s Ulysses in Dublin in the early 1960s could have been easily solved by taking the train to Belfast.
There the Bodley Head edition of Ulysses was so available that my earnest all-girls school, Victoria College, which pulsated Presbyterian rectitude, presented me with it as a leaving prize in the summer of 1963.
I found it an admirable introduction to starting student life at Trinity (and it came back and forward over the Border with me, albeit possibly undeclared)
What sheltered lives Dublin littérateurs must then have been living.
– Yours, etc,
JUNE RODGERS,
Trellech,
Wales.