James Joyce

I'm reading about James Joyce, who is Ireland's premier novelist. He was born to a middle class Irish Catholic family, in 1882. He was sent to a good school, but his father was very bad at making a living and their finances were very uncertain. Joyce loved and hated Dublin. He found late Victorian Ireland stifling, and narrow, especially because of the influence of the Catholic Church, which he rejected. He wanted to write modernist fiction, and to live a free life. He was aware of technological developments which changed life for most people. He was also interested in pscychology which was a new discipline at the time. His novel Ulysses is written in a stream of consciousness format, following the internal monologue of the main character, a Dublin Jew called Leopold Bloom. Other novelists also wrote in this format at the time including Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf. Joyce met a girl called Nora Barnacle, in Dublin, on 16th June, 1904. She was a simple country girl working as a maid. He fell in love with her and they became sexually involved. He did not want to marry; he wanted to live a freer life than was possible at the time.. in a conservative provincial city like Dublin. To live with a lover was difficult in England and impossible in Ireland. The couple left Ireland and went to live in Europe, in different countries, where Joyce taught English and did clerical jobs, to make a living and worked at his great novel, Ulysses. Nora understood very little of his writing.