Edna obrien james joyce biography

Reviewed by Magdalena Ball

James Joyce: A Life
Edna O’Brien
Penguin
Reprint edition (November 29, 2011), Paperback: 192 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0143119937

Biography is a tricky art, no less in need of writerly skills than novel writing.

Edna obrien james joyce biography

The subject is a character who needs to be fleshed out and developed, with conflict and resolution picked from the myriad trivia of day to day activity, into a plotline. What we end up with is not the sum of a life, but a perspective; as much fiction as fact.

So it makes sense that the Penguin Lives series uses well-known novelists to create their short biographies. As with Jane Smiley’s Dickens: A Life, Edna O’Brien’s Joyce: A Life presents a story. Her Joyce isn’t the same Joyce as Ellmann’s Joyce, or Gilbert’s Joyce, or the Joyce presented by Stanislaus – his brother, though O’Brien acknowledges her debt to those biographies.

O’Brien’s Joyce is a unique character, earthy indeed a