[1] On the publication of her first collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye, (1993) Candice Rodd wrote in The Independent: "Morrissy is no glib psychoanalyst; more a cool but gifted pathologist under whose microscope tiny slivers of unremarkable human tissue are shown to be teeming with microbial life and mysterious, mutant energy.
An upright piano abandoned in the street during the Easter rising opens a portal to more affluent times; while her fortitude against poverty and the influence of feckless and abusive men sets a template for the heroines of her younger brother's plays: 'Characters already born and ready-made, roaming their foetid rooms in search of a writer'.
"[9] Morrissy published Penelope Unbound in 2023, a novel which imagined a different outcome to the life of James Joyce and his wife Nora Barnacle after their arrival in Trieste in 1904.
Reviewing the book in The Guardian, John Banville wrote: "The result is a novel of great brilliance and inventiveness, a remarkably – and mysteriously – moving story of what might have been.
It is a stylistic tour de force that Joyce himself would surely have admired: Nora’s voice is earthy, funny, by turns knockabout and melancholy, plain and lyrical, accepting and bitterly regretful.