So far, so ordinary. Shloss started tracking down unpublished letters, medical records and other documents about Lucia and her relationship with her father, as any conscientious academic would. But then she ran into Joyce's grandson, Stephen James Joyce, and a whole world of trouble opened up.

The surviving Joyce, who is now in his 70s and controls most of the writer's estate, refused to let her quote from unpublished material, which remains under copyright until 2012. He continued a family tradition of destroying documents relating to Lucia, who spent her life in and out of mental institutions, and removed others from the National Library just before they were due to be made public. He wrote a stream of letters apparently intended to deter her from publishing at all.

And his campaign bore fruit: the version of Shloss's book, Lucia Joyce: To Dance In The Wake, which came out in late 2003, involved so many lastminute cuts to her archival material that the text came across to many reviewers as an intriguing argument with precious little to support it.

Now, Shloss is fighting back.

Last week, with the help of a team of legal experts from Stanford University, where she teaches, she filed a law suit against the Joyce estate, arguing that Stephen had violated the "fair use" terms of US copyright law and improperly squelched academic freedom of speech. Shloss says her only interest is in furthering public interest in an author she feels passionate about.

"Imagine . . . you're just an ordinary person and your life and work are held in the balance because of the threat of a law suit, " said Shloss. "Professors are not wealthy people.

This is intellectual work and suddenly you wonder if it could destroy your family's security.

You think, could they take my house? All of those things."

As a lengthy profile in the latest New Yorker makes clear, Stephen Joyce has almost always denied permission to quote from documents in his possession and frequently expresses scorn for academics as narcissistic eggheads with nothing useful to say about his grandfather's work. Shloss is far from the first scholar to be stymied by his defence of his family's privacy.

To Carol Shloss, the case has implications for academic freedom far beyond Joyce scholarship. "This affects anybody who writes biography or history. Nobody has challenged the Joyce estate before, they've just had to knuckle under, " she said. "I'm very optimistic we're going to win."

The Joyce estate has yet to respond to Shloss's suit.