Nora Barnacle was the muse and wife of Irish authorJames Joyce. Barnacle and Joyce had their first romantic assignation on a date celebrated worldwide as the "Bloomsday" of his modernist novelUlysses, a book that she did not, however, enjoy. Their sexually explicit letters have aroused much curiosity, especially as Joyce normally disapproved of coarse language, and they fetch high prices at auction. Barnacle was played by Susan Lynch in the 2000 bio-pic Nora.
Early life
Barnacle was born in Galwayworkhouse on 21 March 1884. Her entry in the birth register, which gives her first name as "Norah", is dated 22 March. Her father, Thomas Barnacle, a baker in Connemara, was an illiterate man who was 38 years old when she was born. Her mother, Annie Honoria Healy, was 28 and worked as a dressmaker. Between 1886 and 1889, Barnacle's parents sent her to live with her maternal grandmother, Catherine Mortimer Healy. During these years, she began studies at a convent, eventually graduating from a national school in 1891. In 1896, Barnacle completed her schooling and began to work as a porteress and laundress. In the same year, her mother threw her father out for drinking and the couple separated. Barnacle went to live with her mother and her uncle, Tom Healy, at 4 Bowling Green, Galway. In 1896, at age 12, Barnacle fell in love with a teenager named Michael Feeney, who died soon after of typhoid and pneumonia. In a dramatic coincidence, another boy she loved, Michael Bodkin, died in 1900 – causing some of her friends to call her "man-killer". Joyce later based the final short story in Dubliners, "The Dead", on these incidents. It was rumoured that she sought comfort from her friend, budding English theatre starlet, Laura London, who introduced her to a Protestant named Willie Mulvagh. In 1903, she left Galway after her uncle learned of the affair and friendship, and went to Dublin where she worked as a chambermaid at Finn's Hotel.
Relationship with Joyce
Barnacle met Joyce on 10 June 1904 while still in Dublin and they had their first romantic liaison on 16 June. Joyce later chose 16 June 1904 as the date for the setting for his novel Ulysses and the date has come to be known and celebrated around the world as Bloomsday. The 1904 rendezvous began a long relationship that eventually led to marriage in 1931 and continued until Joyce's death. Barnacle's and Joyce's relationship was complex. They had different personalities, tastes and cultural interests. Of their first meeting, she recalled: "I mistook him for a Swedish sailor – His electric blue eyes, yachting cap and plimsolls. But when he spoke, well then, I knew him at once for just another Dublin jackeen chatting up a country girl." The numerous erotic letters they exchanged suggest they loved each other passionately. These are also of interest because of Joyce's lifelong dislike of swearing and crude language. Joyce seems to have admired and trusted her, and Barnacle clearly loved Joyce and trusted him enough to agree to leave Ireland with him for the Continent. In anticipation of the move to Paris, she began studying French. In 1904, Barnacle and Joyce left Ireland for continental Europe and the following year set up house in Trieste. On 27 June 1905, Nora Barnacle gave birth to a son, Giorgio and later to a daughter, Lucia, on 26 July 1907. A miscarriage in 1908 coincided with the beginning of a difficult time for both. Though she remained by his side, and the couple were legally married in London in 1931, she complained to her sister both about his personal qualities and his writings. During their travels, Barnacle cooked English puddings at Joyce's request. In these letters to her sister, she said he drank too much and wasted too much money. As for his literary activity, she lamented that his writings were obscure and lacking in sense. She was always fiercely proud of him, although she occasionally expressed impatience at his meetings with other artists and admitted she would have preferred him to have been a musician—in his youth, he was a talented singer—rather than a writer. Lucia's mental illness, which became acute in the early 1930s, posed another challenge to the couple's relationship. Nora believed the condition required hospitalisation, which Joyce opposed. They brought in many specialists, and Lucia was for a time the patient of Carl Jung. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to a clinic in 1936. Her father visited her there often, but not her mother. As Nora's biographer Brenda Maddox recorded, "Lucia was rarely out of Nora's mind. Because she had aroused Lucia's most florid schizophrenic reactions, Nora was not allowed to accompany Joyce on his ritual Sunday afternoon visits to Ivry. Not only did this exclude her from any contact with her daughter, it also required her to spend much of each week arranging for someone to accompany Joyce, who could not easily go alone ... Joyce liked to portray himself as safe from Lucia's violence, as if he was the only other permitted inhabitant of her private world. Yet once when Giorgio went with his father, Lucia saw them and cried, 'Che bello! Che bello!' then lunged and tried to strangle them." As Maddox also noted, "There is no record that Nora ever saw her daughter again."
After Joyce's death in Zurich in 1941, Nora decided to remain there. She died in Zurich of acute kidney injury in 1951, at age 67.
Legacy
In 1988, Nora Barnacle was the subject of a biography by Brenda Maddox, Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce. This, in turn, was made into a film, directed by Pat Murphy and starring Susan Lynch and Ewan McGregor, released in 2000. In 2004, an erotic letter from Joyce to Barnacle sold at Sotheby's for £240,800, a record amount for a modern-day letter at auction.
