Groundbreaking in form and of great psychological depth, James Joyce's "Eveline" is a short but important story in Joyce's first major work of fiction, the short-story collection Dubliners (London, 1914). "Eveline" is a portrait of a young woman torn between her obligations to stay and look after her family or escape with her lover to a new life across the sea, and this struggle is developed intricately and realistically.
But the story is also thematically ambitious and highly symbolic, containing allusions to Christianity, mythology, Irish politics, and Dublin's social conditions, and exhibiting many characteristics common to the newly developing literary movement of modernism.
Set in the closing years of nineteenth-century Dublin, Ireland, "Eveline" is very much about the political and social climate of this era. With its majority Catholic population suffering the disgrace and depression of economic and social decline and with no end to English rule in sight, Dublin Catholics were experiencing a spiritual and moral crisis. Part of a series of stories that portray the soul of this city, the publication of "Eveline" was delayed for nine years, until 1914, because publishers were worried about Joyce's controversial methods and themes.
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