To make James Joyce more relatable, an effort to unearth the stories of his many siblings

There was an hour left until the Mount Jerome Cemetery closed. It was almost 3pm.

John Foyle made his way along the gravelly footpath, a thick folder tucked under his arm, holding months of research on the family of James Joyce.

A pair of magpies bobbed about on the old boundary wall, flying down now and then to perch on gravestones. Foyle inspected his map.

He was looking for one pair of graves in particular, in which two of the author’s sisters – Florence and Mary – are buried.

The search is part of a research project, finding the burial sites of Joyce’s siblings, many of which are unmarked.

It isn’t that he dislikes James, he said, with a quick disclaimer. “It is exceptional and world-leading and literary genius and all that.”

But he has found himself exhausted by how much the author has dominated Irish literary history, he said.

Foyle used to work as a tour guide in both the Little Museum of Dublin and the Museum of Literature.

Everyone always wanted to ask about James Joyce, he says, whispering the author’s name. And so much is known about him, where he went and many of the characters that populate his books, he says.

But, when Foyle decided to find out a little more about the siblings – one of the topics that wasn’t brought up much on his tours – it surprised him to learn that their stories were very fragmented, he says. Even though, “aspects of their lives are used in his narratives”.

There is a huge industry around Joyce today, he says. “So many parts of Dublin record the fact that they are featured in his work.”

As he wanders through the graveyard, he wonders if Joyce’s brothers and sisters are deserving of the same treatment as the various landmarks associated with his books receive.

“If their lives were better acknowledged, it might give contemporary Dubliners more of a way to relate to him,” he says.

Missing pieces

Historians have recorded the minutest details about James Joyce, says Foyle. “There’s practically books that go down to the actual tea leaves he would use.”

But a major gap is the lives of his siblings, he says. “I found their stories to be very fragmented beyond material about how aspects of their lives were used in his narratives.”

Members of his family appear in all of his major works, from his brothers and sisters to his in-laws, says Joyce historian and author Vivian Igoe. “No one escaped.”

But the stories of his siblings are largely vague, says Sam Slote, a professor of English at Trinity College, who focuses on 20th-century modernism.

“I often joke with colleagues that his siblings would be a pub quiz category,” he says.

For historians, the number of siblings isn’t completely agreed on, because it depends on how one counts them, he says. “There were ten children that lived past one year.”

Ruth Frehner, a curator at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation said they don’t have enough background knowledge of his brothers and sisters, “since it is likely that he did not have close ties to all his brothers and sisters.”

Still, it is a subject that is not without interest, Slote says. “I did an annotation of Ulysses, and there are a few things there in terms of the siblings, and how the fictionalised representations of them go in there.”

Slote picks a copy of the tome from a shelf in his office. It is 1,400 pages thick with more than 12,000 annotations.

In Ulysses, Simon Dedalus, the fictional father of Stephen Dedalus, had quite a lot of children, Slote says. “There’s a line in it, ‘Fifteen children, he had.’ But taking the text as biographical is not necessarily right.”

He points to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the protagonist Stephen Dedalus can’t provide an exact figure when, late in the novel, he is asked about them by his friend, Cranly:

“Nine or 10 … some died,” was Dedalus’ answer.

Stanislaus Joyce, who wrote various books about the life of his brother, said that Portrait is a fictionalised autobiography, Slote says.

“He takes the ingredients of his lived experience. James had a lot of siblings. Stephen had a lot of siblings. It doesn’t mean there is a one-to-one correspondence,” he says.

For historians, it depends on the way they are counting, he says. “There were ten children that lived past one year.”

In an early letter to Nora Barnacle, his future wife, he told her there were 17 in the family, Slote says.

“It could mean 15 children, plus two parents. But in his brother Stanislaus’ diary, he explicitly writes there were 17 children,” he says.

In Mount Jerome, the folder that Foyle carries lists the burial sites of 11 of Joyce’s siblings, born between 1880 and 1895.

Their names were John, Margaret, John Stanislaus, Charles, George, Eileen, Mary, Eva, Florence, Mabel, Frederick.

The first and last, John and Frederick, both only lived for a few days.

James was the second child of John Sr. and Mary Sr., born in 1882, 15 months after his brother John.

Many are in unmarked graves, says Foyle.

Unmarked graves are not an uncommon thing in either Mount Jerome, or other cemeteries, says Frank McGarry, an office manager at Mount Jerome Cemetery.

“Some families do not erect headstones whilst others are common graves,” he said.

Charles Joyce, who died around the same time as James, is buried in St Albans in England, says Foyle. But there’s no gravestone, he says. “It was never paid for, and someone has actually bought the plot, but never used it yet.”

Five of the children – John, George, Eva, Mabel and Frederick – are buried in Glasnevin, with their mother and father, he says, while Margaret is buried in Canterbury, New Zealand, John Stanislaus is in Trieste, Italy, and Eileen in Bray.

The headstone in Glasnevin only acknowledges the parents, in accordance with their father’s wishes, Foyle says.

Turn left at Mahon

Foyle started a lot of this research during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic, he said, while trudging over gravel. “I knew there were two of them buried here. Mary and Florence.”

After five minutes, Foyle stopped and scanned the rows and rows of headstones.

The headstones are capped with sculptures of the Virgin Mary or a teddy bear, or engraved with tributes to a Liverpool fan, a loving parent or a Korean war veteran.

“We’re going to look for John Mahon, and take a left there,” he said. Then, “Ah, Mahon.”

Foyle approached a nearby stained limestone grave.

Its inscription was dictated by a widower, whose wife Joan Monaghan had died on 24 August 1962.

Below that, the stone read that the man’s mother, May Monaghan, had died on 8 December 1966.

May was Mary Joyce, Foyle says. “She married Joseph Monaghan. But she was widowed in 1928.”

May, or Mary K. Monaghan, as she is listed in Mount Jerome’s records, was born on 18 January 1890, and moved to Galway where she met Joseph, who was a shopkeeper, Foyle says.

Foyle managed to track down one of May’s descendants, he says. “She is more interested in researching her great-grandfather, May’s husband.”

She had to tweak database searches to remove the Joyce factor, he says, otherwise she was deluged by that. “It’s become more of a hindrance to find out about the Monaghan side.”

The wrong gravestone

A few hundred metres away, Foyle stopped again at the final resting place of Denis Somers from Terenure.

Behind is a plot, covered in dried moss, weeds and old feathers.

A small rectangular stone, with a faint engraving, also commemorates Somers, who died in 1973, says Foyle. “The same year as Florence Joyce.”

But, through his research and inquiries, Foyle found out that Florence is actually buried on that spot, he says.

Florence Joyce is indeed the only burial in that grave site, says McGarry, the office manager at Mount Jerome.

Florence worked on the cash desk in Todd Burns and Company department store on Jervis Street, Foyle says. “Eva [Joyce] and Florence lived together. They shared a flat up on Mountjoy Square.”

Neither liked to talk about their older brother and his provocative novels, he says. “They had a certain level of antipathy towards him.”

When Florence passed away in 1973, Senator David Norris, a Joyce scholar, was at the funeral, Foyle says. “He was the only person, as he’d call it, of the ‘Joyce milieu’ who was actually there at the funeral. The rest were mostly family.”

The Dubliners

International visitors to the museums where Foyle gave tours were inclined to ask about every minute detail around Joyce’s life, he says.

But Irish attendees tended to be more jaded with the writer, Foyle says. “They were often like ‘Ah, more bloody Joyce.’”

But, if the people Joyce left behind – like his siblings and their stories – were better chronicled, it might help Dubliners connect to the man himself more, he says. “Because they did lead relatively normal lives.”

Many of his siblings lived in poverty, he says. “They were putting up with this tyrant of a parent after the mother died, and in some ways, when you read through their narratives, the view was that Joyce was living the high life, while they were back in Ireland.”

Some of the siblings found his books to be distasteful too, Foyle says. “It was something they were nearly ashamed of. They were growing up in an Ireland that was very conservative, very religious, and he was that brother in France writing these dirty books.”

Their response to this body of work is somewhat more indicative of Joyce’s reception in Ireland for a long time, Foyle says. “I grew up in that atmosphere. Joyce wasn’t totally taboo. But he wasn’t much more accepted until the 1980s.”