Lucia Joyce: to dance in the wake Carol Loeb Shloss Bloomsbury, 560pp, £20 ISBN 0747570337

Few figures have been more successfully expunged from literary history than James Joyce's only daughter, Lucia. She and her brother Giorgio were dragged across Europe by Nora and James Joyce, changing homes and schools more than a hundred times, before the family finally settled in Paris in the early 1920s. Lucia and Giorgio spoke five languages badly, and the poverty of their travelling life, combined with their parents' indifference to their education, marked them for life. Lucia became a dancer, an illustrator and a daily helpmate for her virtually blind father. Most importantly, she is widely believed to have been the muse for Finnegans Wake.

After puberty, Lucia developed strange neurological symptoms - sudden uncontrollable outbursts and violent physical attacks that resembled Tourette's syndrome. Her father refused to believe in her "madness" and fought valiantly to keep her from being registered as insane. He would not allow her to be lobotomised - an increasingly fashionable operation at the time.

When the 22-year-old Samuel Beckett joined the Joyce household as an unpaid amanuensis for James, Lucia immediately demanded a passionate affair. But Beckett was unwilling to consummate the relationship, as he feared it would further destroy her fragile grip on sanity. No matter how many other fleeing lovers entered her life, she promised never to be unfaithful to her father. Yet after Joyce's death in Zurich in 1941, her mother and brother turned against her.

Giorgio allowed doctors to register her as a "schizophrenic". This was Vichy France, where any registered inmate could be packed off in a train to the east under Nazi rulings on the "insane and sick". Lucia had already been "tortured" by quick-fix monkey-gland injections and excruciating submersion experiments. She was dosed up with enough drugs to keep her in a state of perpetual stupor and spent the last 35 years of her life in institutions. She died at St Andrew's Hospital, Northampton, in 1982 at the age of 75.

Many would think that there is enough material here for a short biographical study. But Shloss is more ambitious. When she embarked on this book, she discovered that all of Lucia's correspondence with her father - several hundred letters - had been destroyed. Lucia's own writings - diaries, essays, poetry, the completed draft of a novel - had, with the exception of one essay, been incinerated. Inexplicably, the Beckett estate had agreed for the letters she exchanged with Beckett to be shredded.

What was there left for Shloss to research? It has become increasingly clear that Richard Ellmann, the first major biographer of Joyce, cowed and bullied by trustees, obligingly swallowed the simplistic view that Lucia was mad and therefore not much use to his study. Even Brenda Maddox, the author of a remarkable portrait of Lucia's mother Nora, was forced to cast Lucia off into the world of the insane. And in 1988, the sole trustee of the Joyce estate, Giorgio's son Stephen, made it clear he wanted no further exploration of the private world of James and Lucia Joyce, and scholars could quote from copyright sources only if they adhered to these rules.

Shloss, in her biography, makes too much of Lucia's dancing credentials. She did appear with some major artists of free form, and she studied in at least two fine schools of dance, but that doesn't go any way to explaining why she was deleted from literary records.

Between 1924 and 1928, in great pain with his eyes, Joyce laboured on the "work in progress" that eventually became Finnegans Wake. Lucia worked long hours in the study to help him. A large section of the book deals with Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (or HCE), who has committed an indecent act with his daughter. This enormous novel of wordplay and mythology is suffused with shame and guilt. And few today deny the implicit suggestions of incest.

Faced by the silence of the destroyed Lucia papers, Shloss resorts to desperate measures. Unable to explain why Lucia walked the streets of Paris at night in search of men, she invokes a similar passage from Tolstoy. She finds it diffi-cult to associate Lucia's discovery of obscene letters from Nora to Joyce with her subject's own sexually explicit outpourings, and so discusses a scene from Ibsen as a kind of parallel. She calls on Conrad, and then Hawthorne. In the absence of historical documents, she is forced to resort to fiction.

While writing Calico, my own play about Lucia, the Joyces and Beckett, it was tempting to lay blame at every door. The sense of uncertainty surrounding Lucia's life made me want to trade fiction for facts. But in the end, I held back. Although I gathered some new material, I didn't tamper too much with myth of the "mad" Lucia. The more she is on view, the greater chance she will have of being remembered.

Unable to find or tell the whole story, but determined to recreate her subject out of literary scraps, Shloss fails to take the imaginative leap of a Peter Ackroyd, yet she writes with enough bravura to make us angry at the pernicious silence that now engulfs Lucia Joyce. Yes, she was her father's "cloud girl" - but that wasn't the whole story.

Michael Hastings's and Michael Nyman's opera Man and Boy: Dada will be at the Almeida Theatre, London N1 (020 7359 4404) from 15 to 18 July

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