John Conmee
John Stephen Conmee SJ (25 December 1847 – 1910) was an Irish Jesuit educator. He was born in County Roscommon into a wealthy farming family and was educated at Castleknock College and Clongowes Wood College.[1] He influenced his student James Joyce and became a character in Joyce's novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. He was a rector of Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare and prefect of studies at Belvedere College.[2]
Joyce was one of his students at Clongowes[3] in 1888. Conmee was influential in granting Joyce and his brothers a scholarship place at Belvedere College, County Dublin in 1893 when Joyce's family collapsed into poverty. He appears under his own name in both Portrait and Ulysses.
Margot Norris analyzed Conmee's existence in some of Joyce's writing.[4] Joyce described him as a bland and courtly humanist in a revision he made to the biography Herbert Gorman was writing about Joyce.[4]
References
- Back to citation "On this day…13 May". The James Joyce Centre. Retrieved 28 November 2018; "Johns Bookshop | Old Times in the Barony". www.johnsbookshop.com. Retrieved 8 December 2019; Igoe, Vivien. "Blazes Boylan, Skin-the-Goat and Frederick Sweny: the real people of 'Ulysses'". The Irish Times. Retrieved 20 December 2019.
- Back to citation "The very reverend, very superior John Conmee · James Joyce Digital Interpretations". jamesjoyce.omeka.net.
- Back to citation O'Mahony, Eoin (28 October 1967). "Father Conmee and His Associates". James Joyce Quarterly. 4 (4): 263–270. JSTOR 25486644.
- Back to citation occurrence 4.0 Back to citation occurrence 4.1 Norris, M. (19 December 2011). Virgin and Veteran Readings of Ulysses. Springer. ISBN 9781137016317 – via Google Books.