Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom (review)
Brenda Maddox's Nora intends to illuminate the shadowy figure of Nora Barnacle, the woman with whom James Joyce spent his life and on whom he modeled all of his important fictional female characters. And Maddox does begin well. She presents a lively view of the Irish ferry on which the twenty-year-old Nora and the twenty-two-year-old Joyce would have fled Dublin in 1904; then she pauses to give Nora's Galway childhood. This early material is also lively and fresh and explains in part how the seemingly independent Nora could stay with Joyce, who managed to remain dependent on the charity of others his entire life. Once the couple reach the Continent, however, and Maddox begins to detail their nomad travels from Trieste to Zurich, Rome, and Paris, readers begin to feel that they're rereading Ellmann' s James Joyce. Granted, Nora had no existence without Joyce, and where he went, she went (except for the solitary Dublin trip that occasioned the famous "dirty letter" exchange), but because there is no new material, Maddox has to resort to such speculative prefaces as "Nora undoubtedly thought that . . ." or "She probably felt . . . ," and the readers are left with no new insights. The substructure of the book is built on the similarities between Nora's life and the lives of Joyce's charactersÂ—the subtitle is "The Real Life of Molly Bloom"Â—but this kind of extrapolating life from fiction is always risky even when an author uses himself as source material. It seems more invalid than usual when