Plan I. Introduction 3 II. Main part 6

II. MAIN PART

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  1Early life
  

Photograph of Joyce aged six, 1888
Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin, Ireland,^[2] to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane "May" (née Murray). He was the eldest of ten surviving siblings. He was baptised with the name James Augustine Joyce^[a] according to the rites of the Roman Catholic Church in the nearby St Joseph's Church in Terenure on 5 February 1882 by Rev. John O'Mulloy.^[b] His godparents were Philip and Ellen McCann.^[7] John Stanislaus Joyce's family came from Fermoy in County Cork, where they had owned a small salt and lime works. Joyce's paternal grandfather, James Augustine, married Ellen O'Connell, daughter of John O'Connell, a Cork alderman who owned a drapery business and other properties in Cork City. Ellen's family claimed kinship with the political leader Daniel O'Connell, who had helped secure the Catholic emancipation for the Irish in 1829.^[8] The Joyce family's purported ancestor, Seán Mór Seoighe was a stonemason from Connemara.^[9]
Joyce's father was appointed rate collector by Dublin Corporation in 1887. The family then moved to the fashionable small town of Bray, 12 miles (19 km) from Dublin. Joyce was attacked by a dog around this time, leading to his lifelong fear of dogs.^[10][c] He later developed a fear of thunderstorms,^[12] which he acquired through a superstitious aunt who had described them as a sign of God's wrath.^[13][d]
In 1891, nine-year-old Joyce wrote the poem "Et Tu, Healy" on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell that his father printed and distributed to friends.^[15] The poem expressed the sentiments of the elder Joyce,^[16] who was angry at Parnell's apparent betrayal by the Irish Catholic Church, the Irish Parliamentary Party, and the British Liberal Party that resulted in a collaborative failure to secure Irish Home Rule in the British Parliament.^[17] This sense of betrayal, particularly by the church, left a lasting impression that Joyce expressed in his life and art.^[18]
In the same year, Joyce's family began to slide into poverty, worsened by his father's drinking and financial mismanagement.^[19] John Joyce's name was published in Stubbs' Gazette, a blacklist of debtors and bankrupts, in November 1891, and he was temporarily suspended from work.^[20] In January 1893, he was dismissed with a reduced pension.^[21]
Joyce began his education in 1888 at Clongowes Wood College, a Jesuit boarding school near Clane, County Kildare, but had to leave in 1892 when his father could no longer pay the fees. He studied at home and briefly attended the Christian Brothers O'Connell School on North Richmond Street, Dublin. Joyce's father then had a chance meeting with the Jesuit priest John Conmee, who knew the family. Conmee arranged for Joyce and his brother Stanislaus to attend the Jesuits' Dublin school, Belvedere College, without fees starting in 1893.^[22] In 1895, Joyce, now aged 13, was elected by his peers to join the Sodality of Our Lady.^[23] Joyce spent five years at Belvedere, his intellectual formation guided by the principles of Jesuit education laid down in the Ratio Studiorum (Plan of Studies).^[24] He displayed his writing talent by winning first place for English composition in his final two years^[25] before graduating in 1898.^[26]
1.2.University years[]

Newman House, Dublin, which was University College in Joyce's time.^[27]
Joyce enrolled at University College^[e] in 1898 to study English, French and Italian.^[30] While there, he was exposed to the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, which had a strong influence on his thought for the rest of his life.^[31] He participated in many of Dublin's theatrical and literary circles. His closest colleagues included leading Irish figures of his generation, most notably, George Clancy, Tom Kettle and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington.^[32] Many of the acquaintances he made at this time appeared in his work.^[33] His first publication— a laudatory review of Henrik Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken—was printed in The Fortnightly Review in 1900. Inspired by Ibsen's works, Joyce sent him a fan letter in Norwegian^[34][f] and wrote a play, A Brilliant Career,^[37] which he later destroyed.^[38][g]
In 1901 the National Census of Ireland listed Joyce as a 19-year-old Irish- and English-speaking unmarried student living with his parents, six sisters and three brothers at Royal Terrace (now Inverness Road) in Clontarf, Dublin.^[40] During this year he became friends with Oliver St. John Gogarty,^[41] the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses.^[33] In November, Joyce wrote an article, The Day of the Rabblement, criticising the Irish Literary Theatre for its unwillingness to produce the works of playwrights like Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, and Gerhart Hauptmann.^[42] He protested against nostalgic Irish populism and argued for an outward-looking, cosmopolitan literature.^[43] Because he mentioned Gabriele D'Annunzio's novel, Il fuoco (The Flame),^[44] which was on the Roman Catholic list of prohibited books, his college magazine refused to print it. Joyce and Sheehy-Skeffington—who had also had an article rejected—had their essays jointly printed and distributed. Arthur Griffith decried the censorship of Joyce's work in his newspaper United Irishman.^[45]
Joyce graduated from University College in October 1902. He considered studying medicine^[46] and began attending lectures at the Catholic University Medical School in Dublin.^[47] When the medical school refused to provide a tutoring position to help finance his education, he left Dublin to study medicine in Paris,^[48] where he received permission to attend the course for a certificate in physics, chemistry, and biology at the École de Médecine.^[49] By the end of January 1903, he had given up plans to study medicine.^[50] But he stayed in Paris, often reading late in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.^[51] He frequently wrote home claiming ill health due to the water, the cold weather, and his change of diet,^[52] appealing for money his family could ill-afford.^[53]
Post-university years in Dublin[]

Bust of Joyce on St Stephen's Green, Dublin, by Marjorie Fitzgibbon
In April 1903, Joyce learned his mother was dying^[h] and immediately returned to Ireland.^[60] He would tend to her, reading aloud from drafts that would eventually be worked into his unfinished novel Stephen Hero.^[61] During her final days, she unsuccessfully tried to get him to make his confession and to take communion.^[62][i] She died on 13 August.^[64] Afterwards, Joyce and Stanislaus refused to kneel with other members of the family praying at her bedside.^[65] John Joyce's drinking and abusiveness increased in the months following her death, and the family began to fall apart.^[66] Joyce spent much of his time carousing with Gogarty and his medical school colleagues,^[67] and tried to scrape together a living by reviewing books.^[68]
Joyce's life began to change when he met Nora Barnacle on 10 June 1904. She was a twenty-year-old woman from Galway city, who was working in Dublin as a chambermaid.^[69] They had their first outing together on 16 June 1904,^[j] walking through the Dublin suburb of Ringsend, where Nora masturbated him.^[72] This event was commemorated as the date for the action of Ulysses, known in popular culture as "Bloomsday" in honour of the novel's main character Leopold Bloom.^[73] This began a relationship that continued for thirty-seven years until Joyce died.^[74] Soon after this outing, Joyce, who had been carousing with his colleagues,^[75] approached a young woman in St Stephen's Green and was beaten up by her companion. He was picked up and dusted off by an acquaintance of his father's, Alfred H. Hunter, who took him into his home to tend to his injuries. Hunter, who was rumoured to be a Jew and to have an unfaithful wife, became one of the models for Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses.^[76]
Joyce was a talented tenor and explored becoming a musical performer.^[77][k] On 8 May 1904, he was a contestant in the Feis Ceoil,^[79] an Irish music competition for promising composers, instrumentalists and singers.^[80] In the months before the contest, Joyce took singing lessons with two voice instructors, Benedetto Palmieri and Vincent O'Brien.^[81] He paid the entry fee by pawning some of his books.^[82] For the contest, Joyce had to sing three songs. He did well with the first two, but when he was told he had to sight read the third, he refused.^[83] Joyce won the third-place medal anyway.^[l] After the contest, Palmieri wrote Joyce that Luigi Denza, the composer of the popular song Funiculì, Funiculà who was the judge for the contest,^[88] spoke highly of his voice and would have given him first place but for the sight-reading and lack of sufficient training.^[89] Palmieri even offered to give Joyce free singing lessons afterwards. Joyce refused the lessons, but kept singing in Dublin concerts that year.^[90] His performance at a concert given on 27 August may have solidified Nora's devotion to him.^[91]
Throughout 1904, Joyce sought to develop his literary reputation. On 7 January he attempted to publish a prose work examining aesthetics called A Portrait of the Artist,^[92] but it was rejected by the intellectual journal Dana. He then reworked it into a fictional novel of his youth that he called Stephen Hero that he labored over for years but eventually abandoned.^[m] He wrote a satirical poem called "The Holy Office",^[94] which parodied William Butler Yeats's poem "To Ireland in the Coming Times"^[95][n] and once more mocked the Irish Literary Revival.^[98] It too was rejected for publication; this time for being "unholy".^[99] He wrote the collection of poems Chamber Music at this time;^[100] which was also rejected.^[101][o] He did publish three poems, one in Dana ^[104] and two in The Speaker,^[105] and George William Russell^[p] published three of Joyce's short stories in the Irish Homestead. These stories—"The Sisters", "Eveline", and "After the Race"—were the beginnings of Dubliners.^[108]
In September 1904, Joyce was having difficulties finding a place to live and moved into a Martello tower near Dublin, which Gogarty was renting.^[109] Within a week, Joyce left when Gogarty and another roommate, Dermot Chenevix Trench, fired a pistol in the middle of the night at some pans hanging directly over Joyce's bed.^[110] With the help of funds from Lady Gregory and a few other acquaintances, Joyce and Nora left Ireland less than a month later.^[111]
1904–1906: Zürich, Pola and Trieste[]