Emily

Emily is Stephen’s first wife, remembered nearly twenty-five years after her death through his writing and, increasingly, through a painful confusion of memory. Stephen has no children, yet he speaks of Emily as his daughter; the mistake exposes how his deteriorating cognition can make the past intrude into ordinary conversation.

Identity and Place in Stephen’s Life

Emily was Stephen’s first wife. She had died nearly twenty-five years before the scene in which Stephen speaks of her, and the account offers no further details about her life or death. Her importance in the present is conveyed chiefly through the enduring place she occupies in Stephen’s recollections and writing.

Reappearance in Conversation

Before a trip to London with Joyce, Stephen tells Elizabeth that he is worried about Emily because she is getting too thin. He wishes she would visit more often so they could keep an eye on her. Elizabeth disagrees about Emily’s weight but accepts the proposed visit as reasonable and says she will speak to her.

The conversation’s apparent familiarity gives way to a stark correction: Emily is not Stephen’s daughter. Stephen has no children; Emily was his first wife, dead for almost a quarter of a century. The error makes Emily’s return to the present more than a simple recollection. Stephen speaks as if she were alive and part of an ongoing family routine, revealing the extent to which his memory has blurred separate periods and relationships.

Writing and Remembrance

Stephen still writes every day, sometimes for hours, and keeps his work locked away. Elizabeth nevertheless reads it from time to time. Some pages repeat material copied from a newspaper, but most often they are stories about Emily or written for her, set down in Stephen’s beautiful handwriting. The contrast between the repeated newspaper passages and the sustained return to Emily shows the different forms his writing takes as his illness advances: repetition on one hand, a continuing literary address to his dead wife on the other.

Emily’s presence is therefore carried both by Stephen’s private pages and by the mistaken conversation Elizabeth witnesses. The stories preserve her as a subject of attention, while his belief that she is a daughter who might visit shows how memory can alter the terms of that attention. The narrative makes the gap between the living Stephen’s routines and the long-past death of his first wife visible without supplying any further account of Emily herself.