Zealous gatekeeper of James Joyce’s literary estate battled with biographers

Stephen Joyce, who has died aged 87, was the grandchild and only surviving descendant of James Joyce and, as principal trustee of his grandfather’s estate, was zealous in defending his copyright, becoming a bete noire of biographers and others foolish enough to take Joyce’s name in vain or to reproduce his words without consent.

After James Joyce’s death in 1941, control of his literary estate passed to his wife, Nora Barnacle. It transferred through the family and then fell to Stephen, the son of Giorgio Joyce, the author’s son, in 1982 – ‘‘The year when the sky darkened and we all heard the thunder’’, as one

Joycean put it.

From then until Joyce’s copyright expired in most places at the end of 2011, Stephen Joyce asserted his claims, not only as the writer’s legal and literary representative, but as his moral and cultural custodian, too.

Targets of his wrath, writs and often exorbitant financial demands included publishing houses, public readings, scholars wanting to quote from Joyce’s writings (academics, he told the New Yorker in 2006, were like ‘‘rats and lice – they should be exterminated!’’) and museums and libraries planning exhibitions or selling Joycean merchandise. Few were spared, and Stephen Joyce never minced his words.

In 1988 scholars who assembled in Venice to hear him address an international symposium were stunned when he announced that he had destroyed all his letters from his Aunt Lucia, the writer’s daughter, who had spent most of her life in mental institutions, along with correspondence to Lucia from Samuel

Beckett, Joyce’s one-time secretary.

‘‘I didn’t want to have greedy little eyes and greedy little fingers going over them,’’ Joyce said. ‘‘My aunt may have been many things, but to my knowledge she was not a writer.’’

Destroying the letters, he explained, was a direct response to Brenda Maddox’s Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (1988), a critically acclaimed biography of his grandmother, which had been published after a long wrangle over copyrighted material ended in the deletion of an epilogue about Lucia weeks before publication.

In 2000, when Stephen Joyce discovered that a musical interpretation of Molly Bloom’s fruity soliloquy from Ulysses was planned for the Edinburgh Fringe festival, he denounced it as ‘‘a circus act’’ and had it pulled.

Similar action was taken over a special children’s reading of The Cat and the Devil ,a story that Joyce had written for Stephen as a child, while a reading from Beckett and Joyce to celebrate Bloomsday 2000, for which the Beckett estate asked for a nominal £20, foundered upon Joyce’s demand for £27,000. Some anthologies facing hefty charges to use