Bonhams 1793 : JOYCE (JAMES) Autograph postcard signed, 1913

Autograph postcard signed ("James Joyce"), to Henry Glover of 114 Leadenhall Street, London, enclosing a money order for 3/-, and asking to be sent "Jacobsen Siren Voices (Heinemann's International Library, paper) – 2/6d"; adding: "Can you tell me what is the price of Ibsen's Letters translated by W. Archer?"; autograph address overleaf, one page on a correspondence card, stamped address in purple ink, creases at corners but otherwise in very good condition, address a little dust-stained, buckram folder, morocco label, 8vo, Via Donato Bramante 4, II., Trieste, 30 June 1913

Sold for £12,500 inc. premium

Footnotes

JAMES JOYCE AND IBSEN: his early reading of Ibsen had a profound influence on Joyce, indeed his first appearance in print was his essay 'Ibsen's New Drama' for the Fortnightly Review of 1 April 1900 'The figure of Ibsen, whose temper, he said in Stephen Hero, was that of an archangel, occupied for Joyce in art the place that the figure of Parnell had taken on him for national life' (Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1982, p. 54). Siren Voices (1896) is the translation by Ethel Robertson of Jens Peter Jacobsen's Niels Lyhne (1880), a novel that has been described as the 'Bible of atheism'. In his student essay 'The Day of the Rabblement' Joyce placed Jacobsen amongst the modern masters, along with his hero Ibsen. In 1905 Ellmann records him reading 'pell-mell Tolstoy, Conan Doyle, Marie Corelli's Sorrows of Satan, Elinor Glyn, and Jacobsen' (p. 193).

This card dates from the transitional stage of Joyce's life when he was completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and about to start on Ulysses. He was at the time teaching at the Scuola Superiore di Commercio Revoltella in Trieste, while giving private language lessons in the afternoon, the setting for his posthumously-published meditation Giacomo Joyce. It comes from the collection of Joyce's younger brother Stanislaus, Sotheby's, 8 July 2004, lot 176. It is not published in either the Letters of James Joyce (1966) or Selected Letters of James Joyce (1975), edited by Richard Ellmann.