Online only · October 14, 2026

Ellmann’s Joyce: The Art of Literary Biography

Henry Vaughan

By Henry Vaughan

Ellmann’s Joyce by Zachary Leader, 2025, Belknap Press, 464 pp.

At twenty, newly arrived in London from Dublin, James Joyce submitted an unfavorable review of a book to C. Lewis Hind, the editor of the Academy, in the hope of securing freelance reviewing work for the literary journal. After several fruitless attempts to persuade Joyce to soften his tone, the exasperated editor gave up. “Oh well, Mr. Joyce, if that is your attitude, I can’t help you,” he said. “I have only to lift the window and put my head out, and I can get a hundred critics to review it.” “Review what, your head?” Joyce asked, and ended the interview.

In Joyce’s time, getting on an influential review journal’s roster provided a respectable income for aspiring young writers. Having refused to compromise his critical integrity or soften his harsh review to please the editor, Joyce destroyed his chances of getting the job before he could even start. It is an anecdote that shows Joyce’s wit, confidence, and standoffishness, and one given to us in Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, first published in 1959 and considered by some to be the greatest literary biography ever written.

The biography is filled with such amusing stories, which give a portrait of the artist throughout his life, from 1882 to 1941. For instance, in that same year Joyce met the older and more accomplished Yeats and told him, “You are too old for me to help you.” It also poses the question that has hung over literary biography for a century: what are such biographical details for? They may be gossip, evidence, or, as Ellmann seems to have thought, a kind of art.

Much of twentieth-century literary study could be separated into two camps: the intrinsic and the extrinsic. Intrinsic approaches, such as the New Criticism, treated a poem or novel as a self-contained whole, to be read without reference to the author’s life or times. Extrinsic approaches, such as structuralism, deconstruction and their offshoots, attended almost entirely to the social and economic contexts, until the author and then the work itself seemed to dissolve into a matrix of external forces. The schools differed on nearly everything else, but both held that the person of the author did not matter. The anecdote about Joyce and Hind was, on either view, material for the gossip pages.

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