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Life
Author of Not All Joy (1932), highly personal autobiographical sketches in fiction form, including reminiscences of illness and death of wife; he is best-known as the reader who rejected Joyce's Dubliners in his capacity as Elkin Matthews’s reader; delicate and careful; his son was Grattan Freyer. IF2
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References
Not All Joy (London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot 1932), viii, 248pp., signed copy [Eggeley Cat. 44]; Do. signed by author [Hyland Cat. 2012 - d/w worn; good: €32].
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Notes
Lady Morgan: the copy of the revised edition of The Wild Irish Girl (Paternoster Row, London: David Bryce 1860), being a reprint of the 1846 rev. edition, which is held in Trinity College, Dublin, Library [TCD] bears to Dermot Freyer, as the inscription shows.
James Joyce: Major Dermot Freyer was the publisher’s reader who rejected Dubliners on the grounds that ‘most of these stories treat of very lower-middle class Dublin life. They are never enlivening and often sordid and even disgusting ... It is a dismal and depressing world, this.’ (See Grattan Freyer [his son], ‘A Reader’s Report on Dubliners’, in JJQ, 10 (Summer 1973), pp.455-57.
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