James & Nora: A Portrait of a Marriage
EDNA O’BRIEN
(WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON, 62 PP, £6.99)
Tablet bookshop price £6.29 • Tel 020 7799 4064

James Joyce apparently rejected the idea that Christ provided the model for a perfect man. “He was a bachelor,” Joyce explained to one friend, “and he never lived with a woman. Surely living with a woman is one of the most difficult things a man has to do, and he never did it.” In this short and pithy book, Edna O’Brien (inset) gives her explanation as to why living with a woman mattered so much to Joyce, and why his relationship with his wife Nora provides a key to understanding his work.

Nora was born in Galway workhouse in 1884, and left the city 20 years later to labour as a hotel waitress and chambermaid in Dublin, where she met the intellectual Joyce. They enjoyed their first romantic meeting on 16 June 1904 and, within four months, this unlikely couple had eloped together, living hand-to-mouth in Zurich, Rome and Trieste.