In the Library
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce, 1916
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 6 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 6
- Length
- Length 85k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
To forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
The reading guide, in the app
How to Read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Often read as a warm-up for Ulysses, it is actually a complete and deeply felt novel on its own terms, and its central trick, that the prose grows and changes as Stephen grows, is one of the most elegant formal inventions in the language.
The novel has a reputation for being the earnest, slightly simpler Joyce you read before the real Joyce, and that framing does it a disservice. A Portrait is not Ulysses with the difficulty turned down; it is doing something genuinely distinct and formally beautiful, which is to tell the story of a childhood and adolescence in prose that changes its register and sophistication as the protagonist ages. The opening pages, with their baby-talk rhythms and nursery images, are written that way on purpose, and the chapter that follows, set in Stephen's first school, sounds like a slightly older child, and the novel continues like this, the language maturing as Stephen does, until by the final diary entries you have an entirely different register from where you began.
If you like this, try
Ulysses
James Joyce
Joyce follows Stephen Dedalus into the day that will define him, but now the city gets the last word.
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Dubliners
James Joyce
Joyce stays in the same Dublin of stifled ambition and religious guilt, but trades Stephen Dedalus's long escape for a series of shorter, quieter epiphanies.
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About the book
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road: that is how the novel opens, and the prose is exactly as young as the boy thinking it. Then it grows up. Chapter by chapter, the language of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ages alongside Stephen Dedalus, from a child's babble through a schoolboy's terror, through the retreat sermon on hell that scorches him into frightened piety, and out into the long, ringing periods of a mind learning to think in paragraphs. The book asks what a soul owes the country, the church, the family that made it, and answers by walking away from all three. On a strand at dusk Stephen watches a girl wading, and beauty arrives in him like a vocation no altar could hold. By the end he is writing in his own voice at last, vowing to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, and you realise the novel has been that smithy all along.