DOTTER OF HER FATHER’S EYES is written by Mary M. Talbot and illustrated by Bryan Talbot. This spouse team creates a compelling combination biography of Lucia Joyce and memoir of Mary M. Talbot, whose father, James Atherton, was a Joycean scholar. This graphic-novel format uses color to demarcate the present, sepia tones with some highlights for Mary’s past and blue-grey for the life of Lucia Joyce. This helps the reader explore all three aspects of the book without any confusion. We begin in the present, when Mary M. Talbot comes across an identification card that belonged to her quite famous scholar of a father. Ms. Talbot reads a biography of Lucia Joyce and finds startling and somewhat disturbing parallels between their lives as children and even as young women.
Of course, being born in another generation, Lucia Joyce’s choices were limited significantly by her gender. Lucia is also victim to her father’s fame and whims as a writer. Mary Talbot shares her own troubled childhood as the daughter of a famous writer, one rather obsessed with the work of James Joyce. She, too, finds herself limited by her femaleness, as her plans for college are sidetracked when she becomes pregnant outside of marriage. Fortunately, Mary Talbot continued her education, and found more opportunities even for mothers in her own generation.
DOTTER OF HER FATHER’S EYES is part memoir, part biography in graphic form. It explores the father-daughter relationship, especially one in which the father is a strong character and well-known public figure. The dichotomy between the public persona and the experience of living with such a man, as a father, is portrayed vividly. We see relative strangers revere both men who were far from admirable figures as fathers. Each daughter had to contend with the admiration of those outside the family unit, even as each suffered for the demanding nature of her father, in both Joyce and Atherton. This duplicitous personality is emphasized when Talbot writes, “My father worked his charm everywhere, it seems. Just very rarely at home” (p. 87). Mary Talbot also writes about reading Sylvia Plath and finding yet another woman with a troubled relationship with her father.
We also glimpse the relationship between Mary and Bryan Talbot in several places. Ms. Talbot interjects that some of the books Bryan includes as part of Mary’s childhood library are ones from his own. In another section of the book, Bryan Talbot exhibits artistic license as he adds generous dashes of color to the sepia tone of Talbot history when he and Mary meet and fall in love. The significance is not lost on this reader, who sees Bryan as a young man, with many “old fashioned” notions of women’s roles. We are never directly told that his attitudes changed, yet we realize they must have, given the feminist scholarship of Mary Talbot over the years as she pursued higher education even after marriage and motherhood. The fact that the Talbots are married and working together to produce such a work of innovative scholarship is a testament to what must have been fundamental changes to their relationship dynamic.
While we know how Plath’s story ended, and in DOTTER OF HER FATHER’S EYES, we learn that Lucia Joyce was repeatedly committed to mental institutions, we can take some solace in the fact that Mary Talbot managed to express herself in a positive way through her work, including the text under consideration. DOTTER OF HER FATHER’S EYES is a gripping memoir and introductory biography of two women who are the daughters of famous men. Their stories are significant and important as we determine whom we revere, and why. DOTTER OF HER FATHER’S EYES shows two examples where men are honored and respected, even if they are not model husbands or fathers. When there is so much criticism of women who are drawn to careers to the supposed detriment of their mothering, such as politics, this text asks us to lift the veil of admiration and to consider the whole of a person. It reminds us think before admiring men for their work and for denigrating women who might pursue roles outside the home.
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