Ulysses chapter misses million mark

Manuscript: One of the earliest complete working drafts

The scrawled manuscript of a chapter from James Joyce's Ulysses has sold for almost £900,000 at auction.

The manuscript - covered in red, blue and black scribblings - was bought by a private collector for £861,250 at Sotheby's.

It had been expected to fetch up to £1.2m.

The telephone bidder was one of only two interested in the lot, and wished not to be identified.

The draft of the Eumaeus chapter has been hailed as "sensational" because it contains text that was later revised and removed and does not appear anywhere else.

It thus fills in gaps in the evolution of the text, say scholars.

The epic novel is widely considered the most important book of the 20th Century.

Joyce: Book was banned in UK and US until 1936

Last year, a hand-written draft of the Circe chapter was sold to the National Library of Ireland in Dublin for £1.5m.

The Eumaeus manuscript is one of the earliest complete working drafts from the novel.

"The fact that this previously unknown draft has come to light could revolutionise our understanding of Joyce's compositional processes," said Sotheby's specialist Peter Selley.

"The textual history of Ulysses has been the subject of the most intense scrutiny and heated debate, generating a huge number of works of criticism and scholarship."

'Obscenity'

The manuscript is written in black, red and green ink, with extensive use of red or blue crayon or pencil crosses to delete passages.

The novel, first published in Paris in 1922, was written over seven years as Joyce travelled through Europe.

It was banned in Britain and America until 1936 because of its "unmitigated filth and obscenity".

All of the action takes place in Joyce's home town of Dublin on a single day - 16 June 1904 - as his three main characters move from a public bath to a funeral, library, maternity hospital and brothel.

The only other known working draft of Eumaeus - a later, incomplete version - is in the Lockwood Memorial Library at the State University of New York in Buffalo.