NCERT Book Class 12 English (kaleidoscope) Short Stories 2 Eveline

12/KALEIDOSCOPE

2
Eveline
James Joyce is a major literary figure of the first
quarter of the twentieth century. He is known
for his bold experiments in narrative techniques
in fiction, and Ulysses is his most famous work.
‘Eveline’ is one of the fifteen stories of Dublin
life that form Dubliners, first published in 1914.
It is a sympathetic portrayal of Eveline, who has
within her reach escape from the drudgery of
James Joyce her life but cannot gather enough courage to
1882-1941 seize it.

She sat at the window watching the evening invade the
avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains
and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She
was tired.
Few people passed. The man out of the last house
passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking
along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching on
the cinder path before the new red houses. One time there
used to be a field there in which they used to play every
evening with other people’s children. Then a man from
Belfast bought the field and built houses in it—not like
their little brown houses but bright brick houses with
shining roofs. The children of the avenue used to play
together in that field—the Devines, the Waters, the Dunns,
little Keogh the cripple, she and her brothers and sisters.
Ernest, however, never played: he was too grown up. Her
father used often to hunt them in and out of the field with
his blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to keep