Zurich was an important turning point in James Joyce’s life, both artistically and financially. It was the city where he and Nora began their life in exile. It became a place of refuge during World War I and again after the outbreak of World War II. And Zurich is their final resting place.

False Start and Return Due to World War I

James Joyce and his partner, Nora Barnacle, first came to Zurich in 1904. However, things did not go as planned. A putatively open position as an English teacher at the Berlitz School did not, in fact, exist. After a little more than a week, the couple moved on to Pula and, later, Trieste. With the exception of a brief stay in Rome, they spent the next ten years there and had two children, Giorgio and Lucia.

World War I forced the Joyce family to leave Trieste in the summer of 1915. The parents chose neutral Switzerland. During their time in Zurich Joyce published the book version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) as well as his only play, Exiles (1917). He also wrote a third of his groundbreaking novel Ulysses during his exile in Switzerland. In addition, the serial publication of Ulysses in the Little Review in New York started during their stay in Zurich.

A Fresh Start: The Writer’s Finances

Just as crucial as these artistic milestones was the fact that Zurich constituted a financial turning point in Joyce’s life. Among other things, Joyce received stipends from the British government, with the help of the poets Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. Even more significantly, however, Joyce began to receive considerable financial support from women like Edith Rockefeller McCormick and Harriet Weaver. Weaver, who initially acted anonymously, would go on to support the Joyce family for years to come, even beyond the author’s death.

His increasingly secure financial situation made it possible for Joyce to focus on his writing. Zurich did not, in other words, remain merely a transit point at the begin­ning of Joyce’s life in exile. From 1915, the city also witnessed a change in his artistic fortunes: No longer a little-known writer who had been chro­nically strugg­ling to make ends meet, he became a modernist icon with a – more or less – stable income.

A Final Return

After the end of World War I, the Joyce family left Zurich and eventually settled in Paris. They came back to Zurich to visit friends as well as for several of Joyce’s many eye surgeries. When the National Socialists invaded France, the Joyces had to flee. They made it back to Zurich in December 1940, but Joyce passed away on 13 January 1941, due to complications after emergency treatment of a perforated ulcer. Both he and Nora are buried in Zurich.