Saving Lucia by Anna Vaught

Abstract

Reviewed by: Saving Lucia by Anna Vaught Annika J. Lindskog (bio) SAVING LUCIA, by Anna Vaught. Hebden Bridge: Bluemoose Books, 2020. 185 pp. £9.99. Following Carol Loeb Shloss’s 2003 biography of Lucia Joyce, several fictional portraits have appeared of James Joyce’s daughter.1 She figures in several plays, such as Michael Hasting’s Calico and Sophia Ginsburg’s L, and she is the subject of several works of fiction, most notably Annabel Abbs’s The Joyce Girl, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem, and Alex Pheby’s Lucia.2 Collectively, these works suggest that Lucia has come to embody a specific position not only within the biographical context of her father’s life but also in culture at large: she has become a symbol of an abused and traumatized woman—misunderstood and disturbed, silenced and forgotten. With Saving Lucia, the British author Anna Vaught adds to this growing body of biographical fiction. Her novel—like Moore’s Jerusalem and Pheby’s Lucia—is set in St. Andrew’s psychiatric hospital in Northampton, United Kingdom, where Lucia Joyce was incarcerated in 1951 and where she eventually died in 1982. Not much is known about her long stay at St. Andrew’s, mostly due to the fact that her nephew, Stephen Joyce, destroyed what remained of her correspondence and a rumored novel manuscript in 1988. Perhaps this lack of information is also the reason why the hospital has become an ideal setting for works of fiction that seek to liberate Lucia, both from her supposedly destructive family and from her incarceration: it provides a blank slate for imagining how a talented young woman would end up locked away from the rest of the world. As the title of Vaught’s novel suggests, this, too, is a work of fiction that seeks to free Lucia from the circumstances of her life. To a large extent, it does so by questioning the idea of insanity that Lucia has come to symbolize: her position as the “dotty daughter of the genius writer” (2). It positions her in the midst of three other women of somewhat similar status. The first of these, Lady Violet Gibson, is the central character of the novel, despite its title and the fact that it is Lucia who narrates. A fellow patient at St. Andrew’s until her death in 1956, Gibson’s claim to fame is her attempted murder of Benito Mussolini in 1926, which failed spectacularly; her shot barely grazed the tip of the Fascist leader’s nose. It is Gibson who mostly speaks in Vaught’s novel, while Lucia both reports on and takes part in her imagined excursions. As part of these, Gibson gives voice to two other women: Blanche Wittmann, one of Jean-Martin Charcot’s most famous hysteria patients at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, and Bertha Pappenheim, who has become known as Anna O. through Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria.3 Placing Lucia among these three other supposedly “lunatic” women makes it clear that Vaught’s novel is more engaged in exploring [End Page 221] a general idea of insanity—perhaps especially in connection with gender—than in depicting Lucia Joyce’s life. Despite the fact that Lucia, the narrator, claims early on that what she is writing is “a more-or-less true story,” there is little inclusion of known biographical facts (2). The famous father is only mentioned sporadically and briefly, either as a genius writer or a loved and concerned “daddy” (11). Throughout, Nora Joyce is referred to as “the barnacle,” the “lower case for disrespect” (11). But neither parent forms a presence in the novel; they are only perfunctorily referred to, and their relationships to their daughter remain without any depth. Somewhat similarly, when Saving Lucia alludes to Joyce’s works, it tends to include the reference, as in “Lucia’s father wrote of those [slums] in Dubliners, you know” or “I remember [Daddy] spoke about liberating sounds—and this is what he did in Finnegans Wake—from their servile contemptible role” (97, 109). The most annoying bits of biographical information wedged into the text are those that refer to things yet...