Once treated by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, Joyce was diagnosed as schizophrenic in the mid-1930s and institutionalized at the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic in Zurich.

In 1927, Joyce danced a short duet as a toy soldier in Jean Renoir’s film adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's "La Petite marchande d’allumettes" (The Little Match Girl).

[1] In 1928, she joined "Les Six de rythme et couleur," a commune of six female dancers that were soon performing at venues in France, Austria, and Germany.

[2] After a performance in La Princesse Primitive at the Vieux-Colombier theatre, the Paris Times wrote of her: "Lucia Joyce is her father's daughter.

Although she did not win, the audience, which included her father and the young Samuel Beckett, championed her performance as outstanding and loudly protested the jury's verdict.

[5] At the age of 22, Joyce, after years of rigorous dedication and long hours of practice, decided "she was not physically strong enough to be a dancer of any kind".

James reasoned that the intense physical training for ballet caused her undue stress, which in turn exacerbated the long-standing animosity between her and her mother Nora.

[8] To his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver, James Joyce wrote that this resulted in "a month of tears as she thinks she has thrown away three or four years of hard work and is sacrificing a talent".

[9] Lucia Joyce started to show signs of mental illness in 1930, including a time period during which she was involved with Samuel Beckett, then a junior lecturer in English at the École normale supérieure in Paris.

By 1934, she had participated in several affairs, with her drawing teacher Alexander Calder, another expatriate artist Albert Hubbell, and Myrsine Moschos, assistant to Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company.

Over the years, she received visits from Beckett, Sylvia Beach, Frank Budgen, Maria Jolas, and Harriet Shaw Weaver who acted as her guardian.

In 1962, Beckett donated his share of the royalties from his 1929 contributory essay on Finnegans Wake in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress to help pay for her confinement at St Andrew's.

"[23] In 2004, Lucia Joyce's life was the subject of Calico, a West End play written by Michael Hastings, and, in 2012, of the graphic novel Dotter of Her Father's Eyes by Mary and Bryan Talbot.