How Much Did James Joyce Base “The Dead” on His Own Family? / Colm Tóibín. In: Lit Hub Daily October 30, 2018

When James Joyce wrote the “The Dead,” which eventually became the last story in Dubliners, it was as though he sought to resurrect those whom he had buried with mockery and distancing in an earlier story for the collection, “Grace.” Instead of studying the main character as though for his own amusement, he entered his spirit, allowed him to have a complex sensibility and a rich response to experience.
The story was also based on an event in his father’s life, but this time instead of recounting it, Joyce began to dream it, reimagine it, and offer it a sort of grace that the previous story had significantly lacked.
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This idea of fully imagining events that had occurred in the lives of the previous generation is analyzed in the opening of an essay on Seán Ó Faoláin by Conor Cruise O’Brien in his book Maria Cross. In Joyce’s last years in Dublin, both he and his father, Stanislaus, spent time in the house of the Sheehy family, whose father was an MP for the Irish Parliamentary Party, and they got to know some of the daughters in that house, one of whom, Kathleen, was the mother of Conor Cruise O’Brien. The figure of Miss Ivors in “The Dead” was partly based on her.

In much of Conor Cruise O’Brien’s own writing about Ireland, there is a sense of a twilight time after the fall of Parnell and before the 1916 Rebellion when his mother’s family, the Sheehys, held power in Dublin, a time that Cruise O’Brien seemed to inhabit with considerable ease and a sort of longing, a time that is also when Joyce imagined his Dublin.
Cruise O’Brien wrote:

There is for all of us a twilight zone of time, stretching back for a generation or two before we were born, which never quite belongs to the rest of history. Our elders have talked their memories into our memories until we come to possess some sense of a continuity exceeding and traversing our own individual being . . . Children of small and vocal communities are likely to possess it to a high degree and, if they are imaginative, have the power of incorporating into their own lives a significant span of time before their individual births. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/how-much-did-james-joyce-base-the-dead-on-his-own-family/