Joyce Biography: Letters

This page profiles Joyce-related letters and correspondence. They are listed by publication date, not by chronological order of writing. Clicking a cover image takes you to Amazon.com. When Brazen Head commentary is unavailable, the publisher’s summaries are usually reprinted. If any knowledgeable Joyce reader would like to review, summarize, or provide additional information for any of these “uncommented” books, please drop us a line! AdditionalJoycean biographies may be found by clicking the links below:

Letters of James Joyce, Vol. I, II, & III

Letters of James Joyce, Vol. I, II, & III
By James Joyce. Edited by Stuart Gilbert & Richard Ellmann
Faber and Faber/Viking, 1957-1966
Available online at Internet Archive: Vol I, Vol III

In 1957 Faber and Faber/Viking published Letters of James Joyce, a selection of Joyce’s correspondences edited by Stuart Gilbert and introduced by Richard Ellmann. It began with Joyce’s famous teenage letter to Henrik Ibsen and concluded with a letter dated 20 December 1940 to the Mayor of Zurich. In 1966, Volumes II and III were published simultaneously, edited by Richard Ellmann: “Since Stuart Gilbert edited Letters of James Joyce in 1957 many new letters have been found. The two present volumes, numbered II and III, include 1136 letters from Joyce, and 197 letters from other persons.” Viking released the trio as a box set that same year:

These three volumes, containing more than 1500 letters, comprise Joyce’s collected correspondence. The initial selection, from the letters that were available sixteen years after Joyce’s death, was made by his long-time friend and explicator, Stuart Gilbert, and is now reissued with corrections as Volume I of this set. It is particularly value for its many letters from Joyce’s Paris years, 1920 to 1939. Volumes II and III, edited by Richard Ellmann, Joyce’s biographer, are from the much larger number of letters now available. Their total of about 1100 includes 200, chiefly from Joyce’s earlier years, to his father, mother, and brother, and some 60 revelatory letters to his wife. Together, the volumes display in great variety Joyce’s courage and plaintive yet almost ruthless confidence, and his cool persistence, during years of hand-to-mouth exile on the Continent, in altering the direction of literature in English.

For explanatory value, as well as for their intrinsic interest, both editors have included some letters written to Joyce by others—among them William Archer, T.S. Eliot, B.W. Huebsch, H.L. Mencken, George Moore, Ezra Pound, Harriet Shaw Weaver, H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats—which give a fuller sense of Joyce’s friendships.

All three volumes are illustrated, Volume I with a frontispiece and facsimiles off Joyce’s handwriting, and Volumes II and III with more than fifty pages of halftones, largely from unpublished or unfamiliar photographs. Value I contains a chronology of Joyce’s life in addition to Stuart Gilbert’s introduction and memoir. For Volumes II and III Richard Ellmann has supplied a long and illuminating introduction, and there is a list of Joyce’s multitudinous addresses, as well as a chronology of his writings and an elaborate index of the letters.

Although the set no longer contains Joyce’s “collected” correspondence—the appearance of new literary letters is always an inevitability, as any H.P. Lovecraft fan will attest!—it’s still an impressive achievement, and showcases Ellmann’s characteristically obsessive approach to Joyce biography and scholarship.

Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce

Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce
By James Joyce & Ezra Pound. Edited by Forrest Read
New Directions, 1970
Available online at: Internet Archive

Publisher’s Description: This is the record of one of the most interesting personal relationships of modern literature. Between 1913, when Yeats first called Joyces’s work to Pound’s attention, and 1920 there was a steady flow of letters, in which we see Pound finding publishers for Joyce, collecting money for him, defending him against censorship, even sending spare clothes. More than sixty letters from Pound to Joyce have survived, while those from Joyce to pound will be found in the Viking Press Joyce correspondence volumes. Perhaps the most remarkable letters are those in which Pound gives his spontaneous reactions as the scripts of Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, Exiles and Ulysses first reached him. We can then trace how these judgments were refined and amplified in the series of pieces that Pound wrote on Joyce for various magazines, the earliest sustained criticism of his work. And finally there are the later insights of the Rome broadcast of 1941 and the references to Joyce in The Pisan Cantos. Pound/Joyce has been edited, with an introduction, extensive running commentary, notes, and a wealth of related material from many sources, by Forrest Read.

Selected Joyce Letters

Selected Joyce Letters
By James Joyce. Edited by Richard Ellmann
Faber and Faber/Viking, 1975

Selected Joyce Letters was originally intended as a “short and convenient selection” of letters sampled from the three volumes of Letters of James Joyce. Even as the project was underway, new correspondence came to light, including some interesting letters between Joyce and Harriet Shaw Weaver. More importantly, restrictions on certain letters were dissolved, allowing Ellmann to fully print the “extraordinary intimate” letters Joyce wrote to Nora in the winter of 1909. Although Ellmann had a “Volume IV” in the back of his mind, these new letters were included in Selected Joyce Letters. Published in 1975, the “short and convenient selection” clocked in at 400+ pages, with the new material ensuring interest even for collectors who already possessed the box set. And this “interest” was not for the Weaver letters, that’s for sure! Selected Joyce Letters is notorious for its inclusion of Joyce’s “smutty” letters to Nora, which start poetic and coy, but end up as full-blown pornography. While modesty forbids me to offer quotations, other Web sites are a little more NSFW!

A Passion for Joyce: The Letters of Hugh Kenner & Adaline Glasheen

A Passion for Joyce: The Letters of Hugh Kenner & Adaline Glasheen
By Hugh Kenner & Adaline Glasheen. Edited by Edward Burns
University College Dublin Press, 2008

Publisher’s Description: Contains all of the extant letters written to each other by the renowned Joyce scholars, Hugh Kenner and Adaline Glasheen, between 1953 and 1984. In these frank letters, we are offered the opportunity to visit the creative process. The letters have been carefully annotated so that we can follow how their ideas are absorbed into their published writings. They do not hesitate to try out ideas on each other and they do not hesitate to express uncomfortable opinions. Their contributions to the common cause spark off each other.

The Letters of Sylvia Beach

The Letters of Sylvia Beach
By Sylvia Beach & Others. Edited by Keri Walsh
Columbia University Press, 2010
Available online at: Internet Archive

Publisher’s Description: Founder of the Left Bank bookstore Shakespeare and Company and the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Sylvia Beach had a legendary facility for nurturing literary talent. In this first collection of her letters, we witness Beach’s day-to-day dealings as bookseller and publisher to expatriate Paris. Friends and clients include Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, H. D., Ezra Pound, Janet Flanner, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Richard Wright. As librarian, publicist, publisher, and translator, Beach carved out a unique space for herself in English and French letters. This collection reveals Beach’s charm and resourcefulness, sharing her negotiations with Marianne Moore to place Joyce’s work in The Dial; her battle to curb the piracy of Ulysses in the United States; her struggle to keep Shakespeare and Company afloat during the Depression; and her complicated affair with the French bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier. These letters also recount Beach’s childhood in New Jersey; her work in Serbia with the American Red Cross; her internment in a German prison camp; and her friendship with a new generation of expatriates in the 1950s and 1960s. Beach was the consummate American in Paris and a tireless champion of the avant-garde. Her warmth and wit made the Rue de l’Odéon the heart of modernist Paris.

“Your Friend If Ever You Had One”—The Letters of Sylvia Beach to James Joyce

“Your Friend If Ever You Had One”—The Letters of Sylvia Beach to James Joyce
By Sylvia Beach. Edited by Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller
Brill/Rodopi, 2021

Publisher’s Description: Giving her back her voice, the long-lost letters of Sylvia Beach to James Joyce uniquely document her unwavering support even beyond her role as publisher of Ulysses, while also revealing her difficulties with his demanding personality and signs of their eventual breach.

Author: Allen B. Ruch
Last Modified: 2 November 2022
Main Joyce Page: The Brazen Head
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Joyce Biography: Letters