Autograph letter signed by James Joyce to Lady Gregory

Autograph letter signed by James Joyce to Lady Gregory

[November 22, 1902]

In this letter, written a week before his first departure from Ireland—a time memorialized at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—20-year-old James Joyce asks Lady Gregory for her help to study medicine in Paris. She in response provided him with contacts in Paris and an introduction to W. B. Yeats. In this central early letter, Joyce positions himself “against the powers of the world,” and ends with a declaration: "Though I seem to have been driven out of my country here as a misbeliever I have found no man yet with a faith like mine.”