Stanford scholar gets six-figure settlement from James Joyce Estate (2009)

thanks for this interesting information. I won't edit my first comment (which puts what you're saying in the 1% possibility).

I didn't base my judgment on research.

The Wikipedia entry explains that much of Stephen James Joyce's efforts to silence academics relates to his aunt, Lucia.

  > In 2004, Stephen Joyce threatened legal action against the
  > Irish government when the Rejoyce Dublin 2004 festival
  > proposed public reading of excerpts of Ulysses on
  > Bloomsday. In 1988 he destroyed a collection of letters
  > written by Lucia Joyce, his aunt. In 1989 he forced
  > Brenda Maddox to delete a postscript concerning Lucia from
  > her biography Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom. After
  > 1995 he announced no permissions would be granted to quote
  > from his grandfather's work. Libraries holding letters by
  > James Joyce were unable to show them without permission.
  > Versions of his work online were disallowed. Stephen
  > Joyce claimed to be protecting his grandfather's and his
  > family's reputation, but would sometimes grant permission to
  > use material in exchange for fees that were often
  > "extortionate".

It's been more than 20 years since I've studied James Joyce's work in an academic setting, but I remember very clearly the family controversies surrounding James Joyce's wife, Nora, and their daughter, Lucia. The only thing I feel can safely be asserted about Lucia is that she suffered from mental illness, usually understood as schizophrenia.

There are also rumors that Lucia shared a bed with her mother and father well past puberty. Such rumors gain strength given that James Joyce's erotic behaviors (documented in his letters to Nora and elsewhere) are considered by many to be fetishistic at best and depraved at worst (coprophilia, for one example).

In 2004, Michael Hastings published an article in _The Irish Times_ about his writing a play about Lucia Joyce. [0] In that article, Hastings writes about the troubling hint of incestuous intimacy between the father-daughter relationship that sits at the heart of Joyce's avant garde masterpiece _Finnegans Wake_.

  > [In _Finnegans Wake_] is a hint of intimacy between father and daughter here
  > that borders on incest. Lucia once remarked to her father
  > that no matter how many loves she had, she could never be
  > unfaithful to him.
  > 
  > Even today among Joyceans this subject remains taboo.
  > Regarding Lucia, academics have toed the Joyce party line -
  > that she suffered fits, had uncontrollable sexual urges, and
  > endlessly shouted forensic sexual details with involuntary
  > abandon. For the sake of being allowed to quote from Joyce's
  > papers, writers have repeatedly cast Lucia as the "problem",
  > just as James and Nora always did. In effect, Lucia has been
  > vaporised from history; memories of her obliterated. She is
  > a "vanished woman".

Given these details, one can understand the intensity of Stephen Joyce's efforts to restrict research surrounding the life of his family, even if one disagrees with the execution of such efforts. As James Joyce's sole surviving descendant, Stephen Joyce may well have decided that squelching such academic and biographical speculation is preferable to seeing traumatic personal details of his family and his most renowned ancestor exposed for all the world to see.

[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/the-life-and-loves-of-lucia-...

The TLDR version:

> In 2004, Stephen Joyce threatened legal action against the Irish government when the Rejoyce Dublin 2004 festival proposed public reading of excerpts of Ulysses on Bloomsday. In 1988 he destroyed a collection of letters written by Lucia Joyce, his aunt.

> After 1995 he announced no permissions would be granted to quote from his grandfather's work. Libraries holding letters by James Joyce were unable to show them without permission. Versions of his work online were disallowed. Stephen Joyce claimed to be protecting his grandfather's and his family's reputation, but would sometimes grant permission to use material in exchange for fees that were often "extortionate".

> When the Central Bank of Ireland issued a ten euro James Joyce commemorative coin on 10 April 2013, Stephen Joyce described the coin and the circumstances of its issue as "one of the greatest insults to the Joyce family that has ever been perpetrated in Ireland".

Sound like a fun person...