"Eveline" by James Joyce  (1914, 5 pages, in The Dubliners)

A Story of Those Who Stayed

Irish Short Story Week Year Two

The Irish Diaspora

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two, March 12 to March 22.   All you need do is post on one short story by an Irish author and send me a comment or an e mail and I will include it in the master post at the end of the challenge. 

"Difficult and Obscure, I beg to differ"

I pity the poor immigrant
Who tramples through the mud
Who fills his mouth with laughing
And who builds his town with blood
Whose visions in the final end
Must shatter like the glass
I pity the poor immigrant
When his gladness comes to pass.-Bob Dylan


In 1914 WWI Started, in Detroit Henry Ford set the minimum wage at $5.00 a day.  The provisional government of the Ulster counties votes to keep Ulster "in trust for The British Empire.    Kokoro, one of the classics of Japanese literature, was published.   The overpower literary event was the publication of The Dubliners.  

During Irish Short Story Week I   a number of people posted on a short story by James Joyce.     I posted on his "The Sisters" on "The View from Mount Parnassus Day".    I also posted on Joyce's "The Dead" on Blooms Day June 17, 2010.     This week I want to post on a beautiful short work that goes deeply into the heart of a young woman, "Eveline".

Joyce's collection of short stories,  The Dubliners, is the most influential collection of short stories from the 20th century, and maybe ever.   

Whether or not Ulysses is the greatest novel of the 20th century is a matter of literary taste.     If you love it, if you hate it, or if you see it as  a work that can be read only by those with a serious literary education and lots of reading time,  it cannot be denied its place as the most influential novel of the 20th century (and so far nothing has come along in the 21th century to threaten this position).   His short story "The Dead" is on most greatest short stories of all times list.   I think those who do not wish to acknowledge his greatest as a short story writer do so either because they they think it is too much for one man to be both the most important novelist and the most important short story writer or because they are academics who for what ever reason do not wish to teach Joyce in their classes.   

"Eveline", told in the third person, is about a young woman longing to be free but afraid of leaving the only place she has ever known and trapped by feelings of obligation to her family.     She is also somehow trapped by the things in her life.

Her mother is now dead, her father needs to be controlled.   He drinks to much and he used to beat his two sons.       Eveline takes care of the house and fixes the meals.     She longs to get away.    She also works at a store for a harsh woman who cares nothing about her.   

Eveline has met a merchant marine.   My first impulse was to think Oh no she has fallen for a sailor in town for a few days.   There is a passage that seems to suggest that Eveline fears being beaten or worse by her  father now that she is nineteen and has no one to protect her.    Joyce's prose is beautiful and hauntingly sad.

" She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her father's violence. She knew it was that that had given her the palpitations. When they were growing up he had never gone for her like he used to go for Harry and Ernest, because she was a girl but latterly he had begun to threaten her and say what he would do to her only for her dead mother's sake. And no she had nobody to protect her. Ernest was dead and Harry, who was in the church decorating business, was nearly always down somewhere in the country. Besides, the invariable squabble for money on Saturday nights had begun to weary her unspeakably. She always gave her entire wages -- seven shillings -- and Harry always sent up what he could but the trouble was to get any money from her father".

It seems the sailor, Frank, is a decent man.   He wants Eveline to marry him and set sail for Buenes Aires, Argentina where there is a house waiting for them.    The story is set in a time 1000s of people are leaving Ireland and Buenes Aires  was a very frequent destination for Irish emigrants.


I do not wish to tell more of the plot of this brief short story.   As the story closes it seems to me that Eveline has made a mistake but one we can all relate to.   


Joyce has compressed several lives into just a few pages but really he has compressed much of the history of Ireland.    You can almost feel the loneliness of 
Eveline in this story.

This story can easily be founded online.   All of the work of Joyce is now in the public domain.

 Mel u

"The Sisters" by James Joyce-Day One of Irish Short Stories Week

"The Sisters" by James Joyce-(1904 and reprinted 1914, 8 pages)

Resources for the Week


The View from Mount Parnassus

Day One

James Joyce

James Joyce (1882 to 1941-Dublin), our first author for Irish Short Story week, is the author of Ulysses (1922).  It is up for debate if Ulysses is the highest literary achievement of the 20th century, that it is the most influential work of the century is simply a fact.    Ulysses is a very high status canon work with some of the most beautiful prose ever written.  Joyce was also very much into the reading life.     Ulysses is not an easy book and was in fact meant to be difficult.  It has been many years since I read  Ulysses but much of it sticks in my mind.    Joyce had a massive ego and famously said he wanted people to study his books for their entire lives.   I felt I had to start  the week with a work by Joyce.   In Ireland since, 1922, you are either a follower of Joyce or in revolt against him.    His short stories, collected in The Dubliners (1914) set a very high standard for other Irish short story writers.   I think that is one of the reasons the quality of the Irish Short Story is so high.   In order to be a literate Irish writer, one  had to have a grasp of the work of  Joyce and this required you take the trouble to educate yourself to a fairly high level.    

"James,  so glad to have you as my first guest,
I hope we can talk privately"-Carmilla 

"The Sisters" was first published in 1904 and then it became the lead story in Joyce's collection of short stories, The Dubliner's in 1914.    "The Sisters" centers on the relationship of a young boy whose name we never learn and a Catholic priest.    As the story opens we learn the priest is terribly ill and is not expected to recover.     The boy is fascinated with the impending death of the priest and begins to look for hidden meanings and omens in the common place.   (There will be some spoilers in the plot summery here-I am sort of OK with spoilers on very high canon status works).   The priest dies the next day and the boy dreams of the priest and his own escape to a strange land.   He goes to the wake and he views the corpse in the company of  two sisters.  

Father Flynn was a very intellectual highly educated man.   He was not in fact considered a very good priest as it was felt he "over thought things" and confused his parishioners.    He also found the routine of being  a priest to be unsatisfying and in fact boring.   He seems to have  suffered from a mental collapse at one point in his career from which he never recovered.     The boy is unaware of this and has tremendous feelings of guilt for not visiting Father Flynn in his final days.

"Mr Joyce, it is a find start for
Irish Short Week you are making"-Rory 

"The Sisters" could be seen as about the relationship of Ireland and the Catholic Church.   Is it being suggested that the Church is caught up in ritual and old ways and out of touch with the needs of the people?   It also seems a commentary on the nature of religion and the existence of hidden structures seen only by a few.   

"The Sisters" is not a story told in a ground breaking fashion.  It is an open story that all can read.   It has real feeling for the boy and the Priest.   It is thematically rich.   Much of the history of Ireland is in this short story.    The boy and Father Flynn both come alive for us.   It is worth reading just for the sheer beauty of the prose.

You can read "The Sisters" online here, along with 14 of his other short stories and if you are so inclined you could even read Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake there!

If you want to participate in Irish Short Stories week all you need do is to post on one story by an Irish author and leave me a comment with a link so I can do a master post.   If you need reading ideas, Google "Irish Short Story Writers".     If  you have any questions, suggestions, or have some ideas for authors to cover, please leave me a comment.

Our first post for The view from Mount Parnassus Day One of Irish Short Stories Week one was on a story by  the most important novelist of the 20th century.     The next post will be on a very odd short story by the most important playwright of the 20th century, Samuel Beckett.     This will be followed with a post on a folk tale by the most important poet of the 20th century, W. B. Yeats.   After today I will post on mere mortal writers and we will meet Carmilla, the first lesbian vampire in the literary world tomorrow.

If you want to participate in Irish Short Story week all you have to do is post on any short story by an Irish author and leave me a comment so I can include it in the master post.


Mel u


Mel u

The Dead by James Joyce-read in observation of Bloomsday

"The Dead" by James Joyce (1914, in his The Dubliners, 45 pages, read  at Dailylit.com)

Ulysses by James Joyce (1888-1941 Dublin) takes place on June 16, 1904.    Every year for a long time now Bloomsday (Leopold Bloom was the central character of the book) is observed in Dublin and elsewhere by oral readings of parts or even all of Ulysses in marathon sessions.       In observation of this day I decided to read his story, "The Dead".    I have also started to read Ulysses on dailylit.com.   At the pace I have set for myself it should take about sixty days.   I read it once long ago but I want to experience it again in the context of my recent readings of Woolf, Ford, and Mansfield.

Whether or not Ulysses is the greatest novel of the 20th century is a matter of literary taste.   Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lectures on Reading I am now being edified by, says it is.    If you love it, if you hate it, or if you see it as  a work that can be read only by those with a serious literary education and lots of reading time,  it cannot be denied its place as the most influential novel of the 20th century (and so far nothing has come along in the 21th century to threaten this position).    About two months ago I began to overcome a life time misguided aversion to the short story as a literary form.   As I began to read various authors I decided I would read the very best short stories first so I would have something to compare others with.    In doing a lot of Google searches on "best short stories of all time" in numerous variation, James Joyce's "The Dead" came up over and over.  

"The Dead" is not written in an experimental style that you  need a hypertext guide to follow. It has a plot, a beginning and end.     It is set in 1904 at a party given every year by the Moran sisters.   The central character is Gabriel Conway.   Gabriel seems fairly well read, he likes Robert Browning, he is self conscious, reflective and seems a good man.   He is also tentative and does not quite feel comfortable in the company of others.   In his conversations with others at the party, most of whom seem his social inferiors in his eyes, he uses the standard bits of Irish nationalism to come up with something to say.     His wife Gretta came to the party with him but he did not seem to pay much attention to her.   He sees an attractive looking woman sitting on the stairs and it takes a moment for him to realize it is his wife deep in thought.    I do not like spoilers myself so I will stop here but Gabriel does achieve an epiphany that may change the rest of his life and his marriage.   I will quote from the opening of the story to give a glimpse of his style:

He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they would recognise from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better. The indelicate clacking of the men's heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education.

He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.

As the story advances  the prose becomes increasingly  more and more beautiful until the last few sentences in which Gabriel achieves his epiphany and we read some of the most beautiful lines in the English language.    It is as if the progression of the prose is pushing us to our own epiphany.    The story ends in the snow as Gabriel requires the cold now as maybe we readers do also.   

In summery,  do not think this story is "hard' or readable only by the seriously over-educated.    "The Dead" is an open work, enjoyable to read and it is fun to feel you are at a country party in Ireland in 1904.   I think once I have completed reading the short stories of Mansfield and Woolf I will then read the rest of the stories in The Dubliners.  

I thank DS of Third Story Window  for suggesting I read this story.    If anyone has any  suggestions as to short stories I might like please leave a comment-thanks

Mel u