Scholar Wins ‘Breakthrough’ Settlement From Joyce Estate

Carol Shloss, a consulting professor of English at Stanford University, has won $240,000 from the estate of James Joyce to cover legal costs incurred in her attempts to get permission to use the writer’s material in her work. The estate had threatened to sue if she quoted from Joyce’s notebooks in Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, her 2003 biography of the writer’s daughter. Ms. Shloss went to court herself and won the right to quote Joyce documents, which the estate has been notoriously unwilling to allow scholars to do. The outcome is “a breakthrough,” Ms. Shloss said, “not just for me but for everybody who has to deal with a literary estate.”