US: A San Francisco academic is suing James Joyce's estate for refusing to give her permission to use copyrighted material about the writer and his daughter on her scholarly website.
In the suit filed in San Francisco's federal court, Carol Shloss, an acting English professor and Joycean scholar at Stanford University, challenged the estate's assertion that she would be infringing on its ownership of Joyce's image by quoting his published works, manuscripts and private letters on her site.
Ms Shloss accused Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, and estate trustee Seán Sweeney of destroying papers, improperly withholding access to copyrighted materials and actively intimidating academics to protect the Joyce family name.
Stephen James Joyce is not named as a defendant in the suit, filed yesterday, but as an agent of his father's estate.
"On multiple occasions defendants have denied permission to quote from James Joyce's writings, or stated that they intended to deny such permission, in retaliation for or as punishment for matters unrelated to protection of copyright in James Joyce's writings," Ms Shloss said in the suit.
Ms Shloss is travelling and was unavailable for comment, according to her lawyer David Olson. He said copies of the suit would be sent to Mr Sweeney's address in New York and to the estate's law firm in Ireland.
The dispute centres on Ms Shloss's research for Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, her 2003 book that suggested Joyce's mentally ill daughter was the muse behind Finnegans Wake.
Ms Shloss, who said she spent 15 years working on the book, relied on Lucia Joyce's medical records, European archives that contained records on her life, and Joyce's papers in university collections to support her theory, the suit said.
Before the book was published, publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux cut several supporting citations from Ms Shloss's work to avoid sparking a lawsuit, according to Mr Olson.
Ms Shloss wants to post that information as an electronic appendix to answer several critics who said To Dance in the Wake was interesting but thin on documentary evidence, he said.
"It's painful once you've written something . . . that you think is complete and good, to have it hacked up," Mr Olson said. "There is a desire to bring it forth in the way she originally intended."
Ms Shloss prepared the website last year but never made it public because she worried about getting sued, he said. Among the items excised from the book are quotations from Finnegans Wake that she thinks support her thesis, as well as letters between Joyce and his daughter, according to Mr Olson.
Ms Shloss wants the court to declare she is entitled to use information the estate controls under laws that allow authors to quote copyrighted works if they do it in "a scholarly transformative manner". - (AP)