Nora Barnacle

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Nora Barnacle (21 March 1884 – 10 April 1951) was the muse and wife of Irish author James Joyce. Barnacle and Joyce had their first romantic assignation on a date celebrated worldwide as the "Bloomsday" of his modernist novel Ulysses, 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 1999 bio-pic Nora.

Early life

Barnacle was born in a Galway workhouse 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. The unusual surname Barnacle is derived from the Irish Ó Cadhain, usually anglicised as Coyne, Kyne, or Cohen or Coen. But in Irish, cadhan meant “wild goose”. And some families made the translation to Barnacle.

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. This house has since been converted into a small museum dedicated to Nora.

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 referenced these incidents in the final short story in Dubliners, "The Dead". 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 (later the name of the hotel was used as the title for a posthumously published collection of 10 short narrative pieces written by Joyce, Finn's Hotel, in 2013).

Later life and death

After Joyce's death in Zurich in 1941, Nora decided to remain there for the rest of her days. She died in Zurich of acute kidney failure in 1951, at age 67. She was buried at Fluntern Cemetery, by her husband's side. Their son Giorgio was buried with them in 1976.

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