There isn’t much to connect legendary Irish writer James Joyce with some of today's favorite paparazzi targets but in his day, Joyce complained of being hounded by the press and “feeling under siege like a hostage” due to reporters waiting at his doorstep. In a letter to his son Giorgio dated July 9, 1931, Joyce shared his dismay at the media’s obsession, once news leaked of his later-in-life wedding to his Galway love, Nora Barnacle. The four-page letter was one among a collection bequeathed to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation by Joyce’s step-grandson, Professor Hans Jahnke, who passed away in 2010.
The collection was been digitally published for the first time in the summer of 2014 by the National Library of Ireland. In 1931, Joyce and Barnacle were living in the Campden Grove area of Kensington in London. They had been living together as man and wife for almost 27 years and had raised their two children, Giorgio and Lucia.
They legally wed in a civil ceremony for, as Joyce put it, “testamentary reasons,” so that Giorgio and Lucia would be his heirs in the eyes of the law. "Ulysses" had been published nine years earlier, and at this point, the novel and its author were internationally known. Sign up to IrishCentral's newsletter to stay up-to-date with everything Irish! Joyce tried to keep news of the civil ceremony as secret as possible by waiting until two days beforehand to apply for the marriage license and by declining to fill in the spaces for his birthp.