According to his brother Stanislaus . . . 'Unhappiness was like a vice.' He was cold and distant except with those closest to him, but when, on his mother's death, he discovered a bundle of letters that his father had written to her before they were married, he spent the whole afternoon reading them 'with as little compunction as a doctor or a lawyer . . . puts questions.' When he had finished, Stanislaus asked him: 'Well?' 'Nothing,' James Joyce answered curtly and rather contemptuously. Nothing, thought Stanislaus, for the young poet with a mission, but clearly something for the woman who had kept them all those years of neglect and poverty.

James Joyce