Unseen letters will give a portrait of James Joyce as a young man

James Joyce’s coveted personal letters will finally be revealed, as the grandson who guarded his estate “with a vengeance” leaves literary treasures to the University of Reading.

Stephen James Joyce was his grandfather’s executor and policed his legacy by battling with biographers, seeking to block academics from quoting the author’s works, and at one point threatening to sue the Irish government over the staging of a Joyce festival.

However, before his death in 2020, he made arrangements to leave “fascinating” material to the University of Reading, it has been revealed, with the vast cache of 800 letters, telegrams and even Christmas gifts set to shed new light on the writer’s personal relationships.

Stephen James Joyce is understood to have chosen the Berkshire university for sentimental reasons, as it houses the archive of Samuel Beckett, who as well as being the protege of his grandfather was also the best man at his own wedding.

The material will enter a public collection at the university this year, the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, and the bundle of personal belongings contains a pen, which may have been used to write sections of the modernist masterpiece.

Guy Baxter, the head of archives at the University of Reading, explained how the closely guarded artefacts were secured: “We were approached by Stephen Joyce a few years ago. He was getting into his 80s then and was looking at making arrangements for this material.

“He made what some would call controversial decisions during his life. He was focused on the family side. He wasn’t interested in the Joyce of academia. I think it’s great that in the end, he wanted that stuff to go to a public collection. It’s material that has never been seen before.”

Stephen James Joyce was the only child of Giorgio Joyce, James’s son, and was the author’s only living descendant. As executor of his estate, he clashed often with academics over their work on his family and barred the use of copyrighted material from his books, which also included Dubliners, Finnegans Wake and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

He was said to have guarded the Joyce legacy “with a vengeance”, declaring in 1988 that he had burned all the letters belonging to his aunt Lucia Joyce, James’s daughter, in response to a biography about her.

Mr Baxter said that the executor was interested in defending the artistic integrity and personal reputation of his beloved “Nonno” James, and it is thought the material he chose to bequeath will show a more sentimental side to the Irish literary giant.

Dr Mark Nixon, the university’s English researcher, said that the material contains manuscripts of Ecce Puer, a poem written by James Joyce for his grandson’s birth, and a handwritten collection of poems given by the writers to his wife at Christmas in 1909, bearing the inscription “To my darling Nora”.

The material mainly dating from the Twenties and Thirties, when the Dublin-born author was living with his family in Paris, also contains a birthday telegram from Beckett and letters from modernist figures such as Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis.

Many of the letters are from Harriet Weaver Shaw, James Joyce’s patron, and were written during a period when his writing was becoming uncomfortably experimental for his final work Finnegans Wake, a 700-page dream narrative written in multi-lingual puns and portmanteau.

Dr Nixon said: “This really falls in the gaps. We have had Joyce’s side of the story, with letters defending himself and his work to Weaver Shaw, who really bankrolled much of his career, but we have never known what exactly she was telling him.

“Now we will be able to see her side of it, what concerns she had, what she was telling him, what criticisms she had.”

Before Weaver Shaw tightened the purse strings, she supported James Joyce financially, and serialised Ulysses at her own expense. The stream of consciousness novel was published in 1922, and the University of Reading will receive the newly released material left by Stephen James Joyce and his wife Solange to mark the 100th anniversary of publication.