Eveline

First published in The Irish Homestead (Dublin) for 10 September 1904, this second-composed, fourth-placed of Dubliners’ tales memorably begins with a striking and much-remarked metaphor: ‘She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.’ Joyce may himself have found the metaphor memorable and striking, for a version of it had previously appeared in the second paragraph of a story by Charles Ollier (1788–1859)—the English publisher (of Keats and Shelley, among others) and author—published in the London edition of Bentley’s Miscellany, vol. 10 (Dec. 1841), 564–75, under the title ‘The Night-Shriek: A Tale for December’. The story begins:

Few aspects of external nature are more impressive than a wintry landscape.  In the morning, the sun’s gleam over a wide expanse of unsullied snow, its rays glittering on the rime-loaded branches of trees, which, as the wind stirs them, nod and wave fantastically like plumes of white feathers,—the lustrous icicles that droop from the eaves of barns and sheds,—the congealed and glassy streams,—and the merry sportsman and his dog,—all these give a joyous effect to a country prospect, even when the year is dying of age and cold.

But this cheerful appearance is very brief.  Noon has not long passed before the sullen shades of evening invade the landscape :  the sun, like a meagre ghost, fades away in a pale and vapoury gloom, leaving to the world nothing but the blank, dark, and dumb night.