Joyce, the Rathmines Connection

Given the day that is in it, it is fitting that staff in Rathmines Library have dressed in costume to mark Bloomsday 2015. This is not by mere chance: James Joyce was born in Rathmines and spent his early years there. Read more below, but first you must admire the costumes on display today...

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Joyce, the Rathmines Connection

Arguably Ireland’s greatest literary genius and a leading proponent of modernism in fiction,  James Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square and spent his earliest years there and in 23 Castlewood Avenue. But as the fortunes of the family declined, the Joyces moved to cheaper accommodation and Joyce was never again to live in Rathmines, leaving Ireland with Nora Barnacle in 1904. He was to spend the rest of his life in Italy and France, paying his last visit to Ireland in 1912. Despite this, he obsessively recorded the minute details of Dublin life in his great work Ulysses and the hero of the novel is considered to embody both the “Everyman” of the twentieth century and the archetypal Dubliner.

Rathmines and Beyond: A Literary Heritage

Rathmines and its surrounding areas could make a convincing argument for being the most literary quarter of our literary city. Birthplace of James Joyce, born at a time when Rathmines’ image was solid, bourgeois and red-brick, the township changed over time, so that by the early 20th century it had become a positive hotbed of political activists and creative types. As the century progressed, its large houses were divided into separate units - "flatland" came into being, and Rathmines became the first stop for many young people moving from the countryside into Dublin. This trend was discontinued in the early 21st century, but throughout all these changes, the area remained home to a wide range of journalists and novelists, poets and playwrights, writers’ groups and reading clubs, with its fine library very much at the heart of this literary activity.