During the months following Mrs. Joyce's death, the household was in continuous turmoil. Joyce, however, withdrew from family problems, and on January 7, 1904, he sat down to write a piece for Dana, a new intellectual journal. He composed a lengthy autobiographical, satirical piece which, at his brother Stanislaus' suggestion, he entitled "A Portrait of the Artist."
A month later, the editors at Dana rejected the work because of its sexual content, but Joyce seized on this opportunity to develop the manuscript into a novel entitled Stephen Hero; the protagonist would be a Catholic artist who was both a hero and a martyr. The novel was published posthumously in 1944, and today, Stephen Hero is treasured because of the rich lode of autobiographical material which Joyce used for his later fictional masterpiece, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
In the spring of 1904, while Joyce was writing the early drafts of Stephen Hero, he was also writing verses for what would eventually become the collection (or suite) of thirty-six poems entitled Chamber Music, a work which was not published until 1907.
It was at this point in his life that Joyce met the woman whom he would love for the rest of his life, Nora Barnacle. They first met on June 10; six days later, on June 16, Joyce knew that he was in love. Thus June 16 became a special day for him, a day which he would use for the chronology of Ulysses. Today, Joyce fans throughout the world still celebrate June 16 as "Bloomsday."
In October 1904, Joyce and Nora moved to Zurich, where Joyce had been promised a teaching position at the Berlitz School. Arriving there, he learned that he could not be employed because the school administrators could not find a record of his application. Frustrated, Joyce decided to move to Trieste. He remained there for the next ten years and continued his writing. A son, Giorgio, was born in 1905, and a daughter, Lucia, was born in 1907.
