After he left the University in 1902, Joyce went to Paris to study medicine and to write; after a brief time, he returned to Ireland, then left for Paris again in 1903 with the intention of devoting himself to full-time literary endeavors; he returned to Dublin when his father's telegram of April 10, 1903, announced his mother's imminent death (she died of cancer on August 13, 1903). Joyce's months of drifting in Dublin ended with the first days of 1904, when he seriously returned to his writing, and in June of that year, Joyce met Nora Barnacle, a 20-year-old Galway woman, with whom he was to spend the rest of his life. The famous "Bloomsday" in Ulysses, June 16, is probably the day on which Joyce discovered that he was in love with Nora. In October, 1904, they left for Zurich, where Joyce had been promised a position teaching at the Berlitz School.
The period from October, 1904 (when Joyce arrived in Zurich to find that the administrators of the Berlitz School had never heard of his application), through the end of June, 1915 (when Joyce, because of World War 1, decided to leave Trieste and to return to Zurich to take up residence), was a mixed one for Joyce. On the debit side one can place several items: Joyce's dislike of Pola, Rome, and Trieste, the last being his chief habitat during the years 1904-15; several years of delay in the publication of Dubliners, which was finally printed in 1914; a lie told to Joyce by his friend Vincent Cosgrave (in 1909, on a return visit to Ireland) concerning Nora's having been unfaithful during Joyce's courtship in 1904; and the failure, in 1909 in Dublin, of Joyce's venture into the cinema business, the Cinematograph Volta. Balanced against these disappointments, however, were the birth of his son, Giorgio, in 1905, and the birth of his daughter, Lucia Anna, in 1907; and the support of Yeats, Pound, and Dora Marsden, who agreed to publish A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in serial form in her review, The Egoist, between February 2, 1914, and September 1, 1915.
Joyce's financial situation improved considerably in Zurich. Through contacts, he tutored several language students, and, with the help of Pound and Yeats, he secured a grant from the Royal Literary Fund. Of greater importance, however, were two patronesses — Harriet Shaw Weaver, whose support of Joyce began in February, 1917, and Edith Rockefeller McCormick, an American living in Zurich, whose large stipend ran from March, 1918, through September, 1919. Miss Weaver, in addition, formed the Egoist Press to publish an English edition of A Portrait, in 1917, after B. W. Huebsch in New York had issued the novel in 1916. (Installments of Ulysses appeared in the Little Review in New York from March 1918 until September — December, 1920; and Joyce's play, Exiles, was published in 1918.)
