100 years of James Joyce’s women: wife, daughter and friend

ABSTRACT

One hundred years after the publication of Ulysses (1922), the novel that would immortalize James Joyce, his ouvre continues to attract readers, intellectuals and artists as much as his private life still fascinates Joyceans, writers and a general public. The present contribution analyses three recent additions to the so-called ‘Joyce industry’, studying a series of fictional texts that feature the allegedly inexhaustible topic of the Irish writer’s complex relationship with women. Annabel Abbs’s The Joyce Girl (2016), Nuala O’Connor’s Nora (2021) and Kerri Maher’s The Paris Bookseller (2022) are the focus of the present contribution, three biofictions of, respectively, Joyce’s daughter, his wife Nora and of Sylvia Beach, the woman who published Ulysses in book form. It is our intention to assess the extent to which these narratives offer a retrieval of three women’s stories, to study them in the context of recent vindications of biofiction as a subgenre that must be distinguished from both biography and historical fiction and, above all, to account for the undeniable interest and even popularity of women related to Joyce among Joycean scholars but also among average readers.

KEYWORDS:

• James Joyce
• Nora Barnacle Joyce
• Lucia Joyce
• Sylvia Beach

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless’s Women in Joyce (1982) and Bonnie Kime Scott’s Joyce and Feminism (1984) were the two contributions that opened up a new line in Joycean criticism in relation to the assessment of his fictional representation of women and of the female condition.

2. Characters such as, among others, Stephen’s mother in Stephen Hero, A Portrait and in Ulysses; Eveline, Miss Ivors and Gretta Conroy in Dubliners; Beatrice and Bertha in Exiles; Stephen’s sisters, Gerty MacDowell, and Molly Bloom in Ulysses; as well as Anna Livia and Issy in Finnegans Wake, have been related to a series of female figures from Joyce’s family and friends who would have inspired him.

3. Written between 1904 and 1906, Joyce abandoned this manuscript and rewrote it as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The manuscript of Stephen Hero, that Joyce threw to the fire and was rescued by his wife and one of his sisters, was published posthumously in 1944.

4. I have published elsewhere on the recurrent topic of motherhood throughout all of Joyce fiction.

5. Biographies have been published about Joyce’s father, daughter and wife, and his brother Stanislaus authored well-known memoirs focused on his relationship with the writer.

6. Brenda Maddox also clarifies that Ellmann changed his opinion little time before his death in 1987, and that he even gave her names, addresses and answered many of Maddox’s questions related to the Joyces.

7. American scholar Carol Loeb Schloss published in (2004) a monumental biography about Joyce’s daughter, Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, that was also object of controversy, mainly due to Loeb Schloss’ excessively positive portrait of Joyce’s daughter and the emphasis that the American scholar put on the girl’s role as indispensable muse for the writer.

8. Nora’s powerful appeal to the Irish imaginary continues and another Irish Writer, Mary Morrissy, has just published a new speculative novel entitled Penelope Unbound (2023), a fictional narrative focused on how Nora’s life could have been, had she not married James Joyce.

9. This comparative study is being carried out in a different piece of research by this author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margarita Estévez-Saá

Margarita Estévez-Saá is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Her research interests include the work of James Joyce and, more recently, contemporary Irish fiction by women. She has published with Anne MacCarthy the book A Pilgrimage from Belfast to Santiago de Compostela: The Anatomy of Bernard MacLaverty’s Triumph over Frontiers (2002), and has co-edited, among other volumes, Silverpowdered Olivetrees: Reading Joyce in Spain (2003), “Ireland in the Coming Time”: New Insights on Irish Literature (2007). Estévez-Saá is Secretary of the Spanish James Joyce Society, member of the AEDEI Executive Board, and former editor of the academic journal Papers on Joyce. Estévez-Saá has published widely on James Joyce, Eilís Ní Dhuibhne, Elizabeth Wassell, Mary Rose Callaghan, Anne Haverty, Deirdre Madden, Anne Enright and Sara Baume. More recently, she has co-edited the volume The Ethics and Aesthetics of Eco-caring: Contemporary Debates on Ecofeminism(s) (Routledge, 2019), and the special number of the journal Estudios Irlandeses 15.2 (2020): “Ecofictions, The Animal Trope and Irish Studies”.