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

Abstract

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.