Barnacle and Joyce had their first romantic outing in 1904 on a date celebrated worldwide as "Bloomsday" after his modernist novel Ulysses.

Their sexually explicit letters have aroused much curiosity, especially as Joyce normally disapproved of coarse language, and they fetch high prices at auction.

The unusual surname Barnacle is derived from the Irish Ó Cadhain, usually anglicised as Coyne, Kyne, or Cohen or Coen.

In 1896, at age 12, Barnacle fell in love with a teenager named Michael Feeney, who died soon after of typhoid and pneumonia.

In a dramatic coincidence, another boy she loved, Michael Bodkin, died in 1900 – causing some of her friends to call her "man-killer".

It was rumoured that she sought comfort from her friend, budding English theatre starlet Laura London, who introduced her to a Protestant named Willie Mulvagh.

Of their first meeting, she recalled: "I mistook him for a Swedish sailor – His electric blue eyes, yachting cap and plimsolls.

In 1904, Barnacle and Joyce left Ireland for continental Europe and the following year set up house in Trieste (at that time in Austria-Hungary).

Though she remained by his side, and the couple were legally married in London in 1931, she complained to her sister both about his personal qualities and his writings.

She was always fiercely proud of him, although she occasionally expressed impatience at his meetings with other artists and admitted she would have preferred him to have been a musician—in his youth, he was a talented singer—rather than a writer.

Because she had aroused Lucia's most florid schizophrenic reactions, Nora was not allowed to accompany Joyce on his ritual Sunday afternoon visits to Ivry.

[2] In 2000, this biography was adapted into a film directed by Pat Murphy, starring Susan Lynch and Ewan McGregor.

[13] In 2023, Mary Morrissy published Penelope Unbound, a novel which imagined a different outcome to the life of Nora Barnacle and Joyce after they arrived in Trieste in 1904.