Search Results for 'Thomas Barnacle'

Nora Barnacle was born on the night of March 21/22 1884 in the maternity ward of the workhouse, part of which served as a hospital. At the time her family were living in Raleigh Row. Her parents were Thomas Barnacle, an illiterate itinerant baker whose heavy drinking kept the family in poverty, and Annie Healy, a member of a family of substance who believed in education and hard work. They married in 1881 and for the next 26 years, led a nomadic life as they moved from tenement to tenement almost with the birth of each child. They had eight children in all, one of whom, John Patrick, died in infancy.

MENTION NORA Barnacle and four things come to mind: she was from Galway; she was sexually adventurous and advanced for her day; she was the partner and muse of James Joyce; and she never read a word he wrote.

BALLINASLOE-BASED author Nuala O’Connor has won the prestigious UK-based Short Fiction Prize for her story ‘Gooseen’, about Galway woman Nora Barnacle, wife and muse to James Joyce.

Nora Barnacle left Galway early in 1904. She was 20 years old, a strong-willed girl running from a tyrannical uncle who disapproved of her latest boy friend. Within weeks of her arrival in Dublin she would become the muse and lover of James Joyce and the inspiration of some and his greatest works — Greta Conroy in The Dead, Bertha the common law wife in Exiles and Molly Bloom in Ulysses — all share some of Nora’s character and experiences. In October of that same year Nora and Jim would elope to Europe and in due course step on to the pages of literary history. She would return to her native city only twice during her 47 years of exile before dying in Zurich in 1951, having lived 67 tumultuous years.