First published in 1988 and re-issued to coincide with Pat Murphy's new film, Nora, this biography of James Joyce's life-long companion, Nora Barnacle, tells the story of a spirited woman who followed her heart. At the age of 21 she left Ireland with the unpublished, obsessive young writer who refused to marry her and whose work she didn't want to read. From Trieste to Paris to Zurich, Maddox traces the couple's precarious, often feckless existence, hugely dependent on the generosity of others. From the raw, uneducated Galway woman who ran away from an unhappy home to be a chambermaid in Dublin, Nora blossoms in Paris into the elegantly dressed consort of the lionised king of Modernism (listening to Wagner in the afternoons, much to Joyce's disgust. Experimental literature, well and good, but experimental music?) Full of well-documented intimate and domestic detail, this is an absorbing, sometimes moving portrait of their mutually dependent relationship, which eventually became a legal marriage in 1931.