''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man begins with one of the most arresting opening sentences in literature'' Patrick McGuinness, from his Preface.
A Portrait first appeared in instalments in the modernist magazine The Egoist in 1914, before it came out as a book in 1916, the year of the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland. An autobiographical ''coming of age'' story, A Portrait is Joyce''s first novel. Many elements of Joyce''s own life - his Catholic schooling, his family circumstances and his father''s financial difficulties, as well as his sexual, political and artistic awakenings - are fictionalized and in it he skilfully extend the English language, as it opens with a child''s voice rendered by a third-person narrator, and closes with the mature Stephen''s first-person reflections.