Erotic Joyce love letter fetches £240k
An anonymous bidder paid £240,800 (€359,532) today for a raunchy letter written by the author James Joyce to his partner and lifelong love, Nora Barnacle, in 1909.
The explicit letter was the centrepiece of a Sotheby’s auction in London of Joyce articles that attracted worldwide interest when they went under the hammer. The successful bidder paid more than four times the expected price.
Joyce scholars had long known about the December 1, 1909 letter – because Joyce referred to its graphically sexual contents in subsequent letters to Barnacle – but it had been presumed destroyed.
A scholar discovered it by chance hidden in the pages of an old book in a collection held by Joyce’s brother Stanislaus. In it, Joyce described in pornographic detail his desires for Barnacle and signed it, “heaven forgive my madness, Jim.”
Two of Joyce’s other love letters to Barnacle, less erotic and more romantic in tone, also were auctioned today. The first, from September 12, 1904 – the first known letter from the writer to his future wife – fetched £33,600 (€50,160), while a second written a month later went for £48,000 (€71,000).
Joyce and Barnacle met in Dublin on June 16, 1904, and left together for continental Europe in October that year, never to return together to Ireland. They were married in 1931, a decade before Joyce’s death.
Joyce scholars dissect the relationship between the two almost as thoroughly as they interpret and reinterpret his writings, particularly his ultra-complex masterwork Ulysses.
Also sold today was another long-lost document that gave insight into Joyce’s writings – the 1910 proofs for his original version of his first major work, the short-story collection “Dubliners,” which Dublin publishers Maunsel & Co. had rejected and ordered all copies destroyed. These sold for £112,000 (€167,000).
One of the earliest published copies of “Ulysses” sold for £84,000 (€125,000). The book, a gift from Joyce to his brother, is inscribed: “To Stannie Jim Paris 11 February 1922.”
