It was also a tribute to Nora Barnacle, the young woman who had bravely eloped with him into exile.ĭubliners has the additional interest of embodying Joyce’s notion of ‘epiphany’ – that delicate and evanescent moment of revelation which it was, he thought, the duty of writers to capture. However, it was an achievement in its own right, the work of a man in his early twenties, written in short energetic bursts, and including one of the best stories in the language, ‘The Dead’. The book, first published belatedly in 1914, was not only controversial for its time but led directly to Ulysses. Joyce wrote almost all his Dubliners’ stories away from Ireland and, like most of his work, they focus unremittingly on a brief period at the turn of the twentieth century – years around which the whole of his imaginative life revolved. I like the idea of trying to capture the spirit of a place through a series of stories such as Dickens’s sketches of London life, Mavis Gallant’s Paris stories and Jack London’s tales of San Francisco. It was published in 1947 for Jonathan Cape by Guild Books, an imprint of the Publishers’ Guild ‘dedicated to bringing out the best from the lists of the twenty-six members’. My Dubliners has followed me to five different addresses and, although a rather flimsy paperback (picked up second-hand, I see, for 1s 6d), remains in fairly decent condition. There are books which sit on our bookshelves for years, getting slightly more foxed as time passes.
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