Narrated in the first person, "The Sisters" deals with the death of a priest, Father James Flynn, who had a close association with a young boy.

In summer of 1904, George Russell of the editorial department of the weekly paper The Irish Homestead wrote Joyce a letter in regards to a section of the journal called "Our Weekly Story": Dear Joyce, Look at the story in this paper The Irish Homestead.

It is easily earned money if you can write fluently and don't mind playing to the common understanding and liking for once in a way.

[4] The 1914 version, like the other Dubliners stories, is written in a style Joyce called "scrupulous meanness", the direct presentation of what is "seen and heard".

In particular, Joyce severely strengthened the relationship between the priest and the boy, making it stand out as a memorable feature of the story.

On 29 August 1904, he wrote to Nora: "Six years ago I left the Catholic Church hating it most fervently.

[13] In Catholicism, "Eucharist" refers both to the act of Consecration, or transubstantiation, and its product, the body and blood of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine.

[14] In "The Sisters", Father Flynn is said to have dropped his chalice, which "contained nothing", a way of saying that the spilt wine had not been changed into the blood of Christ.

[17] In Joyce's Stephen Hero, "an epiphany" is defined "as a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself".

[20] The priest having suffered from a sexually transmitted infection would help account for the adult society's negative opinion and disdain for him.