A new Off-Broadway musical seeks to tell the story of the passionate, tumultuous, and prolific relationship between James Joyce and Nora Barnacle through Nora’s perspective of their nearly 40-year romance. We sat down with Whitney Bashor, who plays Nora, as well as some of the crew, to see how the show came together and how the story of Nora and Joyce might resonate with contemporary women.
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Nora Barnacle is one of the most famous women in the history of Irish literature, not least because her relationship with James Joyce was the genesis of Ulysses. The novel is set on June 16, 1904, supposedly the day that Joyce and Nora first went on a “date,” and now celebrated as Bloomsday, named for the novel’s main character, Leopold Bloom. But Nora was anything but a passive muse to Joyce’s literary talent, as Himself and Nora makes clear.