Covers the remarkable life of James Joyce's only daughter.

"Whatever spark or gift I possess has been transmitted to Lucia and it has kindled a fire in her brain" James Joyce, 1934

Most accounts of James Joyce's family portray Lucia Joyce as the mad daughter of a man of genius, a difficult burden. But Carol Loeb Shloss reveals a different and more dramatic truth: Joyce loved Lucia and they shared a deep creative bond. Lucia was born in a pauper's hospital and educated haphazardly across Europe as her penniless father pursued his art. She wanted to strike out on her own and in her twenties emerged, to Joyce's amazement, as a harbinger of expressive modern dance in Paris. Lucia was a child of the imaginative realms her father created, and even after emotional turmoil wrought havoc with her and she was hospitalised in the 1930s he saw in her a life lived in tandem with his own. Though most of the documents about Lucia have been destroyed, in this important book Shloss painstakingly reconstructs the poignant complexities of her life.

'Shloss gives us a James Joyce we have never seen before'