A Book Review by Frances Devlin-Glass
Mary Morrissy: Penelope Unbound, Banshee Press, Dublin, 2025.
RRP: Au $29
ISBN: 978-1-7393979-9-9
This is a book for the James Joyce initiate, for those who know a little or not much at all about the Joyces, and also for the aficionado, for whom it is a rich plum pudding crammed with characters from the Joyce biographies and the novels, allusions and bits of text. What it does is to construct a speculative set of scenarios based on the premise that Joyce failed to return to the park by the Railway terminus in Trieste to pick up Nora with whom he had eloped from Dublin to Trieste only weeks previously. Both lives march in antithetical directions and reconnect later.
The novel is cleverly bookended by two antithetical major characters and their ambitions for the man Nora calls Jim and Amalia Popper names him Giacomo (she was an early student of Joyce, and translator of some Dubliners stories in Trieste, and in this speculative fiction, his wife). The former wants him to be a singer but he stubbornly clings to his intention to be a writer; Amalia wants to bring him back to fiction but he casts in his lot as an opera singer, as Signor Giacomo Joyce, Irish-Italian tenor. Both careers were probably in his reach. This contrasting set of bookends gives the novel a certain structural neatness and symmetry. It is an elegant conceit.
At a book reading at the Celtic Club on 5 June 2025, Mary Morrissy described her writerly methods. A former journalist, it’s clear that she relishes historical research, and the speculative novel in which she finds alternative life adventures for known public figures gives her licence to be creative, and creative she is. She holds to the facts of Nora and Joyce’s life up to the point where she is left sitting on a suitcase outside the Trieste railway terminus on 20 October 1904 while Joyce seeks some local help at the Berlitz School, Joyce’s employer. Nora, believing herself to be abandoned, is taken into his care by a man who was to become in real life a student and then a close friend and confidante of James Joyce, Ettore Schmitz, better known as the novelist whom Joyce promoted, who used the pseudonym, Italo Svevo. His wife, born with a silver spoon in her mouth, ensures, to her husband’s horror, that Nora, clearly not of her class, is relegated to the servant class, from which she is rescued by Ettore/Hector. With the help of his money, she will, 11 years later, return to Finn’s Hotel in a managerial position as Mrs Smith, a compromising name if ever there was one. There are lots of implausibilities in this plot, but they don’t detain the reader for long, unless they infuriate her. How in a small town like Trieste could Joyce disappear from the radar for years, or Nora not be very visible? Jim, on other other hand, courting the idea of betrayal, as was his wont, and fingering the wound obsessively, in this novel falls into the arms of his student and most implausibly of all, marries her for her money. He’s tired of being the artist in the garret working teaching English to foreigners by day and writing by night. In this scenario, there’s no Ulysses, and not even a complete copy of Dubliners.
In the final section the novel, we get to see the Joyce family, badly come down in the world after the death of May Joyce, through the aristocratic eyes of Amalia, and it’s a harrowing scene. It’s a broken down Dublin she surveys, and the prose is touched with grunge lyricism as she experiences at first hand the Dublin Joyce described in Dubliners as paralysed:
Two little girls in ragged pinafores stand peering gummy-eyed at her, while a huddle of barefoot boys squat at marbles. A third girl with a sty in her eye whips a hoop. Amalia looks up at the gaunt mansions, yes, just as G described, their windows like ramshackle spectacles. A little further down, an art lumbers to a halt and the figure of a man jumps off and heaves a bag of coal from the back. The horse drops its weary head…
At the cascading rattle, the marble players leap up abandoning their game. They run towards the cart, scrabbling to catch the leavings, loading their pockets with lumps of coal.
Easily seen that Morrissy’s research into Joyce’s subjects and style has rubbed off.
This is a romance of sorts, using historical subjects, and enjoying a jeu with a range of well-known texts as playthings. There’s pleasure to be had in it. I especially enjoyed the games with names, my favourite being Bartle McCarthy for Joyce’s rather stuffy tenor, Bartell Darcy, the temperamental star of the gatherings at the Morgan sisters’ Ushers Island Epiphany parties. I’m also taken by Amalia Popper’s transformation of her beloved into Giacomo Joyce. Giacomo Joyce is the title of a love-poem about Joyce’s erotic infatuation with a woman student in Trieste before World War I. The poem was published posthumously and the subject was assumed by Richard Ellmann to be none other than Amalia Popper, the other bookend of this tale. The dates are very convenient for Mary Morrissy’s fiction.
Frances Devlin-Glass
Frances is the Artistic Director of Bloomsday in Melbourne, and a self-confessed Joyce Junkie.
Tinteán 