Anna Livia Plurabelle is the heroine of James Joyce's monument to encyclopedic knowledge and pre-computer noding, Finnegans Wake.
She is the devoted wife of Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (a tavern-keeper with political aspirations), and the loving mother of the Twins, Shem and Shaun, and their younger sister Issy.
In the Joycean Grand Scheme for the Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP) represents the River Liffey as well as most of the other rivers of the world whose names also appear throughout the book. Thus she is the symbol of life and constant renewal, the mature female archetype, Eve, the Mother of All.
Just as Joyce reflects and refracts Earwicker, the Male Principle, into a myriad of forms, ALP, the all-feminine, also transmutes into Isis, retrieving the bones of her brother-husband, Osiris; Iseult or Isolde, the Irish princess who falls in love with Tristan; a grandmother who serves the feast at the Wake; an old barnyard hen who scratches up the scraps of a mysterious letter containing all the secrets of a woman's heart. She is a passing cloud, a flowing stream, a memory of girlhood, a premonition of life's passing.
But always and forever, Anna Livia Plurabelle is a river—time, the principle of vivid movement, changing yet unchanged, the beginning, the middle and the end, converting the past into the future.
O
tell me all about
Anna Livia! I want to hear all
about Anna Livia. Well, you know Anna Livia?
Finnegans Wake, published in 1939, is James Joyce's final novel. Following the publication of Ulysses in 1922, Joyce began working on Wake and by 1924 installments of the work began to appear in serialized form, first under the title "A New Unnamed Work" and subsequently as "Work in Progress." (The final title of the work remained a secret between the writer and his wife, Nora Barnacle, until shortly before the book was finally published.)
The seventeen years spent working on Finnegans Wake were often difficult for Joyce. He underwent frequent eye surgeries, lost long-time supporters, and dealt with personal problems in the lives of his children. These problems and the perennial financial difficulties of the Joyce family are described in Richard Ellmann's biography James Joyce.
