ââ¦many times i dream i am with you but i find my great mistake when i awake from my sleep.â So wrote a 19th century Irish woman emigrant to the United States to her family back home. If you read that and presume the lack of capitalisation is probably because of haste due to the scourge of homesickness, you might be right. The run-on sentence and lack of capitals reads like a despairing, unfiltered keen borne of loneliness.
Studies show that women emigrants especially used a talky, conversational style in their letters, binding them closer to the reader who could probably hear the absent voice, the writer spilling words as if to an eager, in-person listener. And letters, however gappy or crudely rendered, were very welcome, no doubt, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, seated on a wall in Zurich. Image from the UB James Joyce Collection courtesy of the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York.
The fact is no one should be able to read the intimate words that anyone writes to their partnerâthose outpourings are composed for two people only: the lover and the loved. But when youâre writing a novel about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, and the letters are published and are, well, just
there, they become impossible to ignore.
Whenever I told anyone I was writing a bio-fictional novel about Nora and Joyce, they would remark, with glow-eyed glee, âOh, no doubt youâll include the letters.â And, yes, I have included them. But not quite as you might think.
Three Historical Novels Explore the Strength of Human Connection
By Alida Becker
It’s easy to see why Julia Claiborne Johnson filled
BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME (Custom House, 288 pp., $28.99) with movie-star look-alikes. Doesn’t a romantic comedy set on a 1930s Nevada dude ranch teeming with about-to-be-divorced women owe a certain debt to the era’s big-screen classics? Then again, it’s hard to believe a cinematic version could be any more fun than the small-page antics of the aptly named Flying Leap’s two hired hands and the pair of wealthy “guests” who seem determined to make their required stint as legal state residents as memorable as possible.
Some argue that the love letter constitutes a genre in itself since it has rules.
Dwelling on memory, a love letter must acknowledge the absence of the beloved in some way, invoking while removing them.
Most curiously, it almost always focuses more on the lover than on the beloved: the love object is a mere excuse for expression.
“My dearest Theresa,” Lord Byron wrote to his mistress in his garden, August 1819. A century later, on a July afternoon in 1916, Captain Alfred Bland, a British officer in World War I, sat down before battle and did the same: “My only and eternal blessedness” began his letter to his wife. In a hundred years, it seems, not much had changed.
Synopsis of âNoraâ by Nuala OâConnor
Dublin, 1904. Nora Barnacle is a twenty-year-old from Galway who left school at twelve and became a chambermaid. On June 16th, Bloomsday, Nora meets James Joyce, a brilliant dreamer who changes her life forever. Full of passion and lust, the two leave Ireland for Europe, to chase Jamesâ hopes of becoming a writer. Although James refuses to marry, much to Noraâs dismay, their union turns into a lifelong love.
Through their years together, James and Nora surround themselves with a buoyant group of friends that grows to include Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and Sylvia Beach. Nora follows James throughout Europe as he doggedly pursues publication and literary notoriety. But their life is not without challenges. As the years unfold, Nora is torn between her intense desire for James and the constant strain of living in poverty. A selfish drunk, James spends their money on nights out and a string of bad choices force them t