Nuala lets Nora shine in new novel
Lifestyle - Novelist Nuala O’Connor digs deep into the life of Nora Barnacle for her latest book, an intimate exploration of the Galway woman’s relationship with novelist James Joyce, her bravery in eloping with him to Europe and the ups and downs of their extraordinary life together. She tells JUDY MURPHY how it evolved and about her own writing life.
“What I love most about Nora is her courage,” says author Nuala O’Connor of Galway’s Nora Barnacle.
Renowned as James Joyce’s muse and the inspiration for Molly Bloom in his ground-breaking novel, Ulysses, Nora has centre stage in Nuala’s latest novel, which has just been published in Ireland by New Island Books.
Nora was published in the States in January and a great review in the New York Times has been followed by similar this side of the pond. Nora is an arresting read which explores all aspects of their relationship as Joyce’s restless nature brought them to cities including Trieste, Zurich, Rome and Paris, where lack of money was an almost constant worry, especially once they had two children and he remained determined to make a success of his writing, despite all obstacles – some of them self-imposed.
“I have a very understanding editor. Someone who lets you get on with it,” Nuala says. “The opening scene is very frank and she said ‘go for it’.”
Nuala didn’t set out to create ‘shock value’ with the novel’s first page – in fact, she’d never even intended writing a novel about Nora. It evolved from a short story she wrote about the young Galway woman’s early days with Joyce, from their first meeting in Dublin to when they eloped four months later.
“I was enjoying her company so much, I decided to continue,” she explains.
Nuala won a competition with that short story, Gooseen. Then the literary magazine, Granta, published it for Bloomsday 2018, “which was lovely”.
Two of Nuala’s previous novels also focused on the internal lives of extraordinary women – poet Emily Dickinson and 19th century English-born actress Belle Bilton who married Viscount Dunlo of Ballinasloe. Her next work of fiction will be different, she says with a laugh before returning to chat about this one.
“Nora and women like her were seen as marginalia in the life of a man. I wanted to put her at the centre of the page and let her strut her stuff.”
She’s done that. Her fictional Nora is a warm, sympathetic, flawed woman whose sense of adventure and relationship with Joyce took her far from her native Galway and who supported him throughout his writing life, something that wasn’t always easy.
“When I moved to Galway in the mid-1990s, the Nora Barnacle House was there,” Dublin-born Nuala recalls of the tiny house in the city’s Bowling Green where Nora was born and which was open to the public at that stage.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
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