The Dispossessing of Sylvia Beach: Property, Autonomy, Personhood

Sylvia Beach’s identity as a property owner—bookshop proprietor, seller and lender of books, holder of literary rights—has received less attention than James Joyce’s. Two theories of property—the autonomy theory and the personhood theory—illuminate Beach’s proprietary imagination and her charged rivalry with Joyce over Ulysses and her bookshop. Though she labored devotedly for Joyce, Beach resigned her patronage-in-kind after he employed law and deception to divest her of her rights, emotional and material, in Ulysses . Her final dispossession was her own productive self-divestment of bitterness in the memoir that records her role and Joyce’s in modernism.