O’LAOI, Padraic. Nora Barnacle Joyce: A Portrait.

Galway: Kennys Bookshops and Art Galleries Ltd., 1982. First edition. 8vo. pp. 115. With photographic frontispiece portrait of Nora Barnacle Joyce and further illustrations in the text. Original red cloth, lettered in gilt to spine, in the original pictorial dust jacket featuring the well-known portrait of Nora Barnacle. A near fine copy, the text clean and fresh; dust jacket bright and well preserved. One of the most celebrated relationships in modern Irish literary history. Fine in fine dust-jacket.

A concise and sympathetic biography of Nora Barnacle Joyce (1884–1951), the Galway-born partner and later wife of James Joyce, whose meeting with Joyce on 16 June 1904 became immortalised as Bloomsday. Padraic O Laoi’s study traces Barnacle’s upbringing in Galway, her early relationship with Joyce, the couple’s exile on the Continent, and their later years in Paris. Drawing upon contemporary accounts and the scholarship of Richard Ellmann, the book aims to restore Nora’s individuality and character, presenting her not merely as Joyce’s muse but as a resilient and perceptive figure whose personality left a lasting imprint on Joyce’s life and work.

This work forms part of the continuing twentieth-century reassessment of Nora Barnacle’s role within the Joycean circle. Works devoted specifically to Barnacle remain comparatively scarce, and early studies such as this retain interest for collectors of Joyceana, Galway history, and Irish literary biography.

[L3 6A]