‘A granddaughter of Galway’ – Ray Burke on Lucia Joyce

It was fitting that Galway connections should be decisive in the installation beside the joint grave of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle in Zurich, Switzerland, last month of a memorial stone to their only daughter, Lucia. Joyce called Lucia “a granddaughter of Galway” and the installation followed a commitment made by the adopted Galwegian President Michael D Higgins, to Stephen Joyce, the only grandchild and last direct descendant of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, before Stephen died in 2020.

“Of all the women who impacted on Joyce, it is perhaps his daughter Lucia and her artistic genius that has needed to be reclaimed, however late in the day”, President Higgins said recently. He added that Stephen Joyce had told him “in numerous conversations” of his wish that an inscription of “A Flower Given to My Daughter”, written by James Joyce when Lucia was a child, be installed on a memorial stone at Nora and James’s grave in Zurich’s Fluntern Cemetery.

The stone, carved from the exact same rock as lies over Joyce and Nora’s grave, carries a full inscription of the eight-line poem that Joyce wrote for Lucia, who was born in Trieste in 1907 and who died in hospital in Northampton, England, in 1982.

President Higgins said that Lucia Joyce was “an exceptional woman whose light was so unfairly extinguished” by the mental illness that afflicted her from her early-20s. He said that her early genius as a celebrated dancer in France and Italy had been “too easily dismissed” when she spent most of the remainder of her life in psychiatric institutions.

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Lucia was unable to join her parents and her only brother Giorgio and nephew Stephen when they fled from France to neutral Switzerland during the second World War. The German authorities controlling Vichy France initially indicated that she would be allowed to travel to Switzerland with the rest of her family, but they reneged as the war worsened.

Before he died suddenly in January 1941, James Joyce pleaded in vain to the Geneva-based acting secretary general of the League of Nations, Irishman Seán Lester, to try to get the Red Cross society to intervene on Lucia’s behalf. “Joyce spared no pains and spent large sums in attempts to have his daughter cured, but unavailingly, and the last years of his life were clouded by this grief”, recalled his friend Stuart Gilbert.

After Lucia’s initial incarceration in France Joyce told his patron Harriet Weaver: “I imagine that if you were where she is and felt as she must you would perhaps feel some hope if you felt that you were neither abandoned or forgotten. I will not do so as long as I see a single chance of hope for her recovery”.

Aside from her dancing prowess, which came to the attention of WB Yeats and the Abbey Theatre, the young Lucia was a gifted illustrator of some of her father’s writings and of Christmas cards and greetings sent to relatives and friends. A special limited edition of Joyce’s autobiographical poetry collection “Pomes Penyeach” contains illustrations and decorative initial letters “designed and illustrated by Lucia Joyce”, he wrote on the cover.

Joyce presented a copy of the special edition to the library of the University of Galway in 1935. He told the university librarian that “the designer of the lettrines is a granddaughter of your city” and he told Lucia: “I presented it in our name (that is, yours and mine) to the library of the University of Galway, as you are a grandchild of that ancient city and I am a descendant of one of its tribes”.

The poem A Flower Given to My Daughter is one of 13 in the collection Pomes Penyeach. Its second verse says: “Rosefrail and fair – yet frailest/A wonder wild/In gentle eyes thou veilest,/My blueveined child.” Joyce wrote it in Trieste in 1913 shortly after his last visit to Ireland.

Lucia was transferred from a sanatorium in France to St Andrew’s Institution in Northampton in 1951. She died there 31 years later and she is buried in the city’s Kingsthorpe Cemetery. Her gravestone reads: “Lucia Anna Joyce, Trieste 1907, Northampton 1982″.

Shortly before her death she sent a letter to the dean of the University of Galway when her mother’s home in Bowling Green was opened as a museum by the then mayor of Galway, future President of Ireland Michael D Higgins. She wrote: “I am very glad my mother is being commemorated in Galway and I send kind regards to everyone”.