Date: October 30, 1904
Year: 1904
Title: James Joyce Begins His Life in Pola
Short Description: James Joyce and Nora Barnacle leave Trieste for Pola, beginning a short period abroad that would become an important chapter in the life of Ireland’s greatest modern writer.
Story:
On October 30, 1904, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle left Trieste aboard the Graf Wurmbrand, bound for Pola on the Istrian coast. They had left Dublin only three weeks earlier, determined to begin a new life together on the continent.
Joyce had travelled abroad hoping to find work teaching English at the Berlitz School. When there was no position in Trieste, he was offered a post at the newly opened school in Pola, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The young couple arrived with little money and few possessions. Joyce began teaching English, mostly to naval officers, while continuing to write. Pola was not a place he particularly loved—he later called it a kind of “naval Siberia”—but the months he spent there became an important part of his development as a writer.
During this period, Joyce continued working on Stephen Hero and began writing what would become the short story “Christmas Eve,” one of the early pieces connected with the work that eventually became Dubliners.
Joyce would soon move back to Trieste, where he spent many of his most productive years. But his departure for Pola on this October day marked the beginning of a long European exile that would shape his life, his writing and, ultimately, the course of twentieth-century literature.