Lecture

31 July 2024 at 7pm

The James Joyce Centre was proud to host Prof. Martin Connolly (Tsurumi University) on Wednesday, 31 July 2024 at 7pm as he posited the question, “Did Joyce borrow from Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd to write his short story ‘Eveline’? “

James Joyce discovered Thomas Hardy on the shelves of the Capel Street lending library as early as 1896 at the tender age of fourteen. It was a great thrill for the young adolescent to read books which contained matter deemed racy by many of a Victorian mindset, people like ‘Old Grogan’, the prudish librarian there. Ten years later, in Trieste, he was still avidly reading the English author, and giving his brother Stanislaus a running commentary as he did so. Joyce liked to find fault with Hardy (and with English writers in general) but in his letters it is clear that Joyce enjoyed, and quietly admired, Hardy’s works. Joyce’s oeuvre is replete with echoes of almost everything he ever read, so finding traces of the work of an author he knew so well in one of his stories, especially one of his very first stories, should come as no surprise.

At first glance, “Eveline” and Far from the Madding Crowd do not seem very comparable. One is a very short and ostensibly simple tale of a 19 year-old Dublin girl who plans to elope with a sailor against the wishes of her father. The other is a pastoral epic novel involving complex and complicated romantic interactions between four main characters played out over years. Yet the crucial dramas in both stories revolve around the disruption caused when an outsider of dubious morality woos the central female protagonist. Eveline’s ‘close shave with disgrace and ruin’ (as described by Margot Norris) could equally be applied to the trouble which the lady at the centre of Hardy’s story finds herself in.

As Prof. Connolly’s careful exegesis showed, Hardy may have meant more to Joyce and his writing than Joyce ever cared to admit.

Born in Liverpool and raised in Belfast, Prof. Martin Connolly has resided in Japan since 1991. He is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin (BA) and Queen’s University (MA). He is a Professor of English Literature at Tsurumi University in Yokohama, Japan and teaches creative writing at Keio University. He has published on Medieval English Literature, James Joyce, and other Irish writers. He is also an active writer of poetry, short stories and novels, including Belfast, with Dinosaurs, 1979 (Shanway Press, 2022), Narrative Poems – Out of the Ordinary (Brimstone Press, 2024), and a book of original jazz photos Kind of Green (Snowchild Press, 2023).

The James Joyce Centre is supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.