An unprecedented glimpse into the hidden life of Lucia Joyce, adored only daughter of James Joyce, and the lover of Samuel Beckett, has revealed the loneliness of her final years in England.
Born to Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle in 1907 in Trieste, the flamboyant dancer was to be shut away in mental institutions for most of her adult life. Treated by Carl Jung for supposed schizophrenia, she spent her last 30 years in Northampton's St Andrew's hospital for mental diseases, rarely meeting anyone from outside.
"The tragedy was that she had once been so creative and accomplished. She was gentle and kind and it was a very touching visit," said Helen MacTaggart, a Joyce enthusiast who met her one afternoon in 1977 and who took a rare photograph, published here for the first time. "Even her mother hadn't ever visited her. I don't think she spoke to many people."
The story of Lucia, which has been guarded carefully by the Joyce estate and by the novelist's grandson, Stephen, has always mystified literary historians and fascinated fans of the writer's work. It was the subject in 2004 of a West End play, Calico, written by Michael Hastings. Yet all documents about her life remain sealed and unavailable to scholars.
For some, Lucia is a lost creative talent, thwarted in her prime, while for others she is simply the charismatic young girl who witnessed at close quarters the working relationship between two of the greatest writers of the 20th century: her father and the playwright Beckett, who worked as Joyce's assistant in Paris in the late 1920s.
The unknown photograph of Joyce's daughter in her room at Northampton has come to light thanks to a biography, out next month, of the aristocrat Violet Gibson, born in Dublin in 1876, who in 1926 attempted to assassinate the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in Rome. Violet, like Lucia, was later incarcerated in St Andrew's. The graves of the two neglected, unconventional women lie close by, and Gibson's biographer, Frances Stonor Saunders, came across details of Lucia's last years during her research.
The young Joyce girl, who had a cast in her eye, spent her childhood travelling through Europe until her parents settled in Paris. The author and his daughter were very close and shared a private language that often baffled others and fed into his books. As a young woman, Lucia joined the renowned dancing school run by Raymond Duncan, the brother of the experimental dancer Isadora Duncan. Her performances were well received, but her grip on reality faded when she was rejected by Beckett, who told her that it was her father, not her, that had been the real draw.
When Lucia's hospital visitor, MacTaggart, later told her that she had once met Beckett in Paris, the patient was quick to ask after him. "She asked me privately if I had noticed if he was with anyone. She meant a woman. She was still in love with him. And I do think, as many do, that Beckett had used her," said MacTaggart this weekend.
Lucia's behaviour had become erratic by her mid-20s and her father referred to "her King Lear scenes". At the novelist's 50th birthday party in 1932 she threw a chair at her mother and so her brother, the musician Giorgio Joyce, took her to an asylum. Following the death of her father nine years later, Lucia was left inside Nazi-occupied France in an institution at Ivry, near Paris, and was later moved to Northampton at the age of 43, where Beckett visited her once.
When MacTaggart visited her in 1977 she found the hospital "quite sinister". "It was not a nice place to be," she recalled. "Lucia talked a lot and I got the impression she did not see enough people. She smoked non-stop and had quite a guttural, European accent, not an Irish lilt." After the visit MacTaggart sent Lucia some writing materials she had asked for, but promptly received a letter from a nurse telling her not to do so again.
When Beckett visited St Andrew's in the early 1950s he said he thought it a peaceful, domesticated place and an enviable escape from the troubles of life. Lucia died there in 1982.
The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, by Frances Stonor Saunders, is published next month by Faber