A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Read Free Page A

Richmond Street. JJ reads Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses and writes theme on Ulysses as ‘My Favourite Hero’.
1895
JJ enters the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
1896
JJ chosen prefect of the Sodality, attends retreat, later claims to have begun his ‘sexual life’ in this, his fourteenth year.
1897
JJ wins prize for best English composition in Ireland for his age group.
1898
JJ begins to read Ibsen, attends and reviews plays. Leaves Belvedere. (Sept.) Enters Royal University (now University College, Dublin). Family continues to move from house to house.
1899
(8 May) JJ attends première of Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen , refuses to sign students’ letter of protest to the Freeman’s Journal against the play.
1900
(20 Jan.) JJ delivers paper ‘Drama and Life’ before the university Literary and Historical Society, defending the attention paid to mundane life in contemporary drama (especially Ibsen’s); outraged protest from students. (1 Apr.) JJ’s review of Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken , ‘Ibsen’s New Drama’, published in Fortnightly Review . Ibsen responds with pleasure. JJ visits London, attends Music Hall, writes prose and verse plays, poems, begins to keep ‘epiphany’ notebook.
1901
JJ writes ‘The Day of the Rabblement’, an attack on the Irish Literary Theatre and its narrow nationalism, and publishes it privately in a pamphlet with Francis Skeffington’s essay arguing for equality for women.
1902
(1 Feb.) JJ delivers paper to Literary and Historical Society praising the Irish poet James Clarence Mangan and advocating literature as ‘the continual affirmation of the spirit’. (Mar.) JJ’s brother George dies. JJ leaves university and registers for the Royal University Medical School. (Oct.) Meets Yeats and, later, Lady Gregory. Leaves Medical School and (1 Dec.) departs for Paris, ostensibly to study medicine. Passes through London where Yeats introduces him to Arthur Symons. Reviews books for Dublin Daily Express . (23 Dec.) Returns to Dublin for Christmas.
1903
JJ meets Oliver St John Gogarty. (17 Jan.) Returns to Paris by way of London. Giving up on medical school, spends days in Bibliothèque Nationale, nights in Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. (Mar.) Meets Synge. (11 Apr.) Returns to Dublin due to mother’s illness; she dies (13 Aug.). JJ continues to write reviews.
1904
JJ writes essay ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, first seeds of later novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Begins writing stories, which will become Dubliners , and publishes three in the Irish Homestead . Begins work on Stephen Hero . Writes and publishes poems which will be collected later as Chamber Music . Leaves the family home, takes rooms in Dublin, teaches at Clifton School, Dalkey. Writes ‘The Holy Office’, a satirical poem about the contemporary Dublin literary scene. (10 June) Meets Nora Barnacle and on 16 June first goes out with her. Joins Gogarty (for one week) in the Martello Tower, Sandycove. (8 Oct.) JJ and Nora leave Dublin together for the Continent, first to Zurich, then to job with the Berlitz School in Pola where JJ will teach English.
1905
JJ and Nora move to Trieste, where JJ teaches English for Berlitz School. (27 July) Son, Giorgio, born. Chamber Music submitted to (and refused by) four publishers in Dublin and London. First version of Dubliners submitted to Grant Richards, Dublin publisher, who contracts to publish it, but later withdraws. Stanislaus moves to Trieste (where he stays until his death in 1955).
1906
(July) Family moves to Rome where JJ accepts abortive job in bank. (30 Sept.) JJ writes to Stanislaus, ‘I have a new story for Dubliners in my head. It deals with Mr. Hunter’; later (13 Nov.) identifies it: ‘I thought of beginning my story Ulysses .’ Begins ‘The Dead’ instead.
1907
(Jan.) Riots at the Abbey Theatre over J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World . (7 Feb.) JJ writes to Stanislaus: ‘ Ulysses never got any forrader than the