Lucia Joyce

Lucia Joyce was a professional dancer in Paris, was diagnosed with schizophrenia at twenty-five, and spent the last forty-seven years of her life in institutions. She was born in a paupers' ward in Trieste, grew up between Trieste, Zurich and Paris speaking Italian at home and moving too often to be schooled properly, and in her twenties trained seriously in modern dance under Raymond Duncan and Margaret Morris among others. She performed and was noticed - one Paris review said she would be her father's heir and that his genius was hers - and then gave it up in 1929, at about twenty-two, saying she lacked the physique. Samuel Beckett, then her father's assistant, was involved with her and broke it off by telling her he came to the house for Joyce, which she took badly. The behaviour that followed - violence towards her mother, a catatonic episode, wandering off - was diagnosed variously; Carl Jung, the twentieth doctor to see her, said that she and her father were like two people going to the bottom of a river, one falling and one diving. Joyce refused for years to accept that she was ill, believed she was clairvoyant, and paid for clinics he could not afford. She was committed in 1936 and after his death in 1941 was moved to England, where she lived at St Andrew's in Northampton until she died. Her letters were destroyed by the family. Finnegans Wake is full of her. She was buried at Kingsthorpe in Northampton. Beckett visited her in the asylum over many years. Carol Loeb Shloss s 2003 biography argued that the family s destruction of her letters was deliberate suppression, and was met with a legal challenge from the Joyce estate.

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