USD $153.00
“Your friend if ever you had one”– The Letters of Sylvia Beach to James Joyce
Series: - European Joyce Studies, Volume: 31
- European Joyce Studies, Volume: 31
This is the first-time publication of long-lost letters by a crucial figure in modernist publishing. Carefully edited and extensively contextualised, they document Beach’s unwavering, all-embracing support for Joyce’s art by publishing his controversial
Ulysses in Paris in 1922 and other efforts such as getting fragments of
Work in Progress published. They also reveal her difficulties with his uncompromising and demanding personality, as it is vividly illustrated in the
Frankfurter Zeitung affair. The edition moreover includes all extant letters to Paul Léon, her successor after their break-up following severe disagreements over the American edition of
Ulysses. Joyceans and scholars of modernism will find this an indispensable resource for further research.
Ruth Frehner and Ursula Zeller, long-time curators at the Zürich James Joyce Foundation, have edited essay collections, curated Joyce exhibitions, participated in the revision of Wollschläger’s classic German translation of
Ulysses and, jointly and separately, published articles on various topics. Ursula Zeller has also developed dramaturgic concepts for Joyce’s fiction that were performed on stage in Zürich, while Ruth Frehner has focused on introducing Joyce’s literary universe to local students. Their next joint project will be a centennial exhibition on
Ulysses 2022.
“This astutely annotated volume at last provides a robust capture of the other side of the correspondence published in 1987 by editors Melissa Banta and Oscar A. Silverman, James Joyce’s Letters to Sylvia Beach, 1921-1940… Of the edition’s 145 letters, 131 are published for the first time. The compilation offers a vivid portrait in letters of Beach, the owner of the famous Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Company, tracing her evolving working relationship with Joyce through its periods of flourishing, tension, and eventual diminution in the 1930s, as Beach ceded her place as Joyce’s primary assistant to Léon…
The editors also usefully frame the correspondence with lists surveying letters gathered in the volume; a timeline of relevant events during this period; and a color-data visualization charting the flow of letters at different moments. (Given the nature of such material, further volumes of this kind would be well served by digital publication.) Moreover, the welcome clarity and elegance of Frehner and Zeller’s accounts of their editorial procedures, the scope of the letters, lacunae, and the backstory of how they became available, bespeaks seasoned professionalism. We reap the benefits of their expertise about supporting apparatus, a new era of editorial transparency, and today’s awareness of the value of what Frehner and Zeller rightly call “epistolary scholarship” (xviii)."
-Miranda Dunham-Hickman, McGill University, James Joyce Quarterly, 60.4 2023, pgs. 623-636.
The editors also usefully frame the correspondence with lists surveying letters gathered in the volume; a timeline of relevant events during this period; and a color-data visualization charting the flow of letters at different moments. (Given the nature of such material, further volumes of this kind would be well served by digital publication.) Moreover, the welcome clarity and elegance of Frehner and Zeller’s accounts of their editorial procedures, the scope of the letters, lacunae, and the backstory of how they became available, bespeaks seasoned professionalism. We reap the benefits of their expertise about supporting apparatus, a new era of editorial transparency, and today’s awareness of the value of what Frehner and Zeller rightly call “epistolary scholarship” (xviii)."
-Miranda Dunham-Hickman, McGill University, James Joyce Quarterly, 60.4 2023, pgs. 623-636.
These letters are important for experts and students alike, indeed anyone interested in Joyce, Modernism, publication history, book marketing, feminism, literary Paris, early reception history, multilingual literatures and comparative studies.