Nora with an H

With only a month to go to publication date (October 5), I’m in author’s limbo. Penelope Unbound is out of my hands but not quite born yet. However, I do know what the cover looks like – some very clever graphics from Anna Morrison – and some great endorsements from fellow writers – thanks to Jan Carson, Kevin Power, Lisa Harding and Nuala O’Connor. There’s now nothing to do but wait until it’s launched.

The novel from Banshee Press is about Norah Barnacle. Just her. Not James Joyce, but as you can see from the cover, it’s impossible to escape his presence in the novel. It’s impossible to escape his presence, full stop! Even so, Penelope Unbound is a speculative fiction which imagines a life for Norah Barnacle without James Joyce.

It’s a “what” if tale. In it, I play the Goddess and split the pair up just after they arrive in Trieste in 1904. Joyce left Norah at the railway station when he went off to scare up funds and accommodation leaving her to guard the luggage. She waited the best part of a day for him to come back. In real life, she waited, but in Penelope Unbound she doesn’t.

I give Norah a completely different life without Joyce, although I do grant them a reunion – in Dublin 11 years later – but you’ll have to buy the book to see how that goes.

Eagle-eyed readers (especially all my old sub-editor pals out there) may notice that “my” Norah Barnacle has an H at the end of her name. This is not just a fictional device to emphasise the speculative nature of the book. In fact, according to Brenda Maddox’s biography, Nora, she was christened Norah, and before she met Joyce, that is how she spelled her name. It was he who insisted she change it – perhaps in deference to his literary hero Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House?

So I unwind the clock and stick with the spelling she used as a young woman in Galway and the early part of her stay in Dublin. In her early letters to Joyce, she still signs herself Norah, but at some stage in 1904 she becomes Nora, perhaps when she became Jim’s (as she called him. )

While society demanded that women relinquish their family name on marriage for centuries, being asked to alter or change your first name is something different because it is so tied up with your singular identity. In this case, it was only a different spelling, but it created a before and after in Norah/Nora Barnacle’s life. This may very well reflect the truth of their situation – Norah and Joyce’s meeting certainly changed both of their lives.

But by insisting she change her name, Joyce became the “author” of her new identity as Nora.

And that’s the one we’re still using 119 years later.

Penelope Unbound is published by Banshee Press, October 5, 2023.