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.
In September 1907, Joyce began to transform Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, retaining "Stephen Daedalus" for the protagonist's name. It was a name which Joyce himself had already used as a pen name, and it was also a name which linked the first Christian martyr (Stephen) and the mythic Greek maze-maker (Daedalus), a man known for his cunning and skill. In addition, because Daedalus was the father of Icarus (who attempted to fly with wings fashioned by his father), the surname provided Joyce with multiple variations on the flight theme, a motif which would pervade the novel. Later, Joyce changed the spelling of the hero’s last name—ostensibly, in order to deemphasize the autobiographical nature of the book.
Joyce also began working again on Dubliners, a book of short stories that he hoped would be a "polished looking glass" of Dublin, a mirror in which he could lamentably reflect on the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural paralysis that he believed had infected the people of Ireland. He was unsuccessful in getting Dubliners published, and, in a sudden fit of rage, he threw the manuscript of A Portrait into the fire. Luckily, his sister Eileen was nearby and recovered it nearly intact.
Feeling that he needed to return to Ireland, Joyce took young Giorgio with him, leaving his wife and daughter behind in Trieste. He wanted to see for himself what had happened to his country of "betrayers."
Back in Dublin, not only did Joyce come to grips with the forces which had created his deep concern for Ireland, but a personal episode occurred which shaped his future works. During a meeting with an old friend and former rival for Nora's attentions, Vincent Cosgrave, Joyce became convinced that in the early days of his courting Nora, she would, after leaving Joyce for the evening, spend the rest of the evening with Cosgrave. Joyce's feelings of betrayal caused him to write a series of accusatory letters to Nora, who didn't respond at first. Later, Joyce learned from a friend that Cosgrave had lied about the incident. This revelation caused Joyce to become penitent and, in some ways, even worshipful of Nora. These letters to Nora, written during the Joyces' separation in 1909, have proven literarily significant. We know now that they provided the psychological spur, as well as the literary material, which Joyce needed to complete the final chapters of A Portrait and establish the essential themes for his novel Ulysses and his play, Exiles.
In 1915, after the outbreak of World War I, Joyce moved his family to Zurich, and there he finished A Portrait and received welcome assistance from such literary notables as William Butler Yeats and an American exile, Ezra Pound, both of whom were instrumental in A Portrait’s being published in serial form in The Egoist. The first installment appeared in 1914, on Joyce's birthday, February 2. The publication of A Portrait as a single volume met with difficulties, and it was only with the help of two literary patronesses, Harriet Shaw Weaver and Edith Rockefeller McCormick, that it was finally published by B. W. Huebsch in New York in 1916, and later in England by Miss Weaver’s newly formed Egoist Press, in 1917. Coincidentally, Dubliners was also published in 1914, by Grant Richards.
