Word: nora
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...Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom, Brenda Maddox has finally given to Barnacle what she truly deserves--her own identity and life, free from the many characters that Joyce created out of her experiences...
...works--so greatly that his first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is considered nearly biographical. For many of his female characters, who seem even more real and human than the male characters which Joyce based on himself and his experiences, he drew on Nora. Molly, Gretta Conroy in The Dead, Anna Livia Plurabelle in Finnegans Wake all bear striking resemblences to Nora...
...Nora was her own person, and from the very beginning Maddox lets the reader know that it is her biography, not Joyce's, by dispelling many of the myths about her. She could cook, although legend had it that she couldn't, but the Joyces ate in restaurants because Joyce liked to go out a lot. She was not illiterate; although she never could get all the way through Ulysses (neither could W.B. Yeats), Nora read and memorized many of his poems...
...lack of money did not seem to keep Nora and James from trying to produce a family. Nora conceived a son, Giorgio, and a daughter, Lucia, before she had a miscarriage which kept her from having other children. But that did not keep the couple from having an active sex life. Joyce's wildest sexual fantasies, which readers of Ulysses will recall from the text, were earnestly fulfilled by Nora, and their erotic letters, written during the few times in their lives that they were apart, are filled with the couple's rather eccentric sexual fantasies...
Joyce, despite his incessant jealousy, also nearly pushed Nora into an affair to garner new material for him to write about. Nora refused to succumb and teased him about his wishes, addressing letters to him, "Dear Cuckold." That spirit helped her to deal with her son's affair with one of her friends, her daughter's nervous breakdown and Joyce's death. It also helped her finally convince Joyce to agree to marry her, 27 years after they first ran away together...