I first encountered James Joyce during a master’s module on Irish literature in Rome. We studied Ulysses, of course, but that led me to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - which, in fact, wasn’t even part of the programme. When I first read Stephen Dedalus’s story, I thought: “Jesus Christ, this is my story!”
Like Stephen, I come from a deeply Catholic background, and my rebellious streak made me identify with him. I was fascinated by how he challenged the values he’d been raised with. Years later, it reminded me of Nora Helmer in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, when she tells her husband: “I do not exactly know what religion is,” before declaring she will decide for herself whether what the clergyman says is true or not.
I wrote my master’s thesis on Joyce’s love-hate relationship with the Irish Catholic Church, and then decided I wanted to pursue the question further in a PhD. But since almost everything had already been written on Joyce’s faith (what hasn’t, really?), I asked myself: “What does Joyce represent to me?” The answer: “a model of emancipation.”
Out of curiosity, back in 2018 I posted in a Facebook group of Joyce fans, asking which Irish writers had seen him in this way. The responses - Samuel Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan – were almost all men. Only one woman was mentioned: the wonderful Edna O’Brien. So I read The Country Girls and was struck by the many echoes of Joyce.
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From there, I moved on to Eimear McBride, then Anne Enright and finally Emilie Pine. One afternoon, walking past Trinity during my PhD, I saw a homeless man reading Pine’s Ruth & Pen. I picked it up myself and realised it was, in many ways, a feminist reworking of Ulysses.
Those answers reflected a larger truth. In Joyce studies, he is usually placed alongside male contemporaries and successors, with writers lamenting the shadow he cast over Irish literature. Yet countless Irish women writers have engaged with Joyce - both challenging and building on his legacy in their fiction.
Ironically, Joyce’s work is often described as “obscure”, when in fact he illuminated what had long been kept in darkness. Enright once described him as the first female Irish writer: he dignified domesticity, introspection and the body - subjects traditionally dismissed as “women’s writing”.
More than wars and power, as the title Ulysses might suggest, Joyce was writing about love - the opposite of hatred, as he put it – and the everyday war of life: its struggles, demands and those rare but precious moments when we win small conquests of happiness. That’s why, while I once identified with Stephen Dedalus, I now see myself more in Leopold Bloom: someone simply trying to be a decent human being, despite limits and peculiarities.
It’s for this reason that I feel a pang when Joyce is called a misogynist. There’s a tendency - especially in academia - to categorise everything, to lock books and their authors into rigid definitions. Joyce, instead, was always resisting them. Perhaps that’s why he left Ireland: to define himself, rather than be defined by others or by structures of power.
In studying these women, I was also studying myself. The religious focus remained: many of their characters grapple with Catholic legacies, wrestling with sexuality, shame and identity. And what better place to explore my own legacies than Ireland - a country still reckoning with its own religious past?
Just as Joyce moved to my country, Italy, I moved to his hometown: Dublin.
Another discovery was feminism. I read the works of Anne Fogarty and Gerardine Meaney, but also Susan Sontag and bell hooks. For me, it was like an eye test: when the doctor slips in the right lens and suddenly everything comes into focus - not just the object in front of me, but the whole picture. I began to see how inequality runs through every layer of society, from literature to technology, which I came to know as a journalist covering artificial intelligence.
Most of us fear AI stealing jobs or weakening our critical thinking. Fewer consider the data behind these systems. Like literature, AI is shaped by the stories we feed into it. Left unchecked, its datasets could entrench historical biases for decades to come.
This is why it matters to digitise the works of Irish women writers, to add them to the Irish Writers poster and even to Wikipedia - like in the case of Irish author Dorothy Nelson, who still doesn’t have a page. And it matters, too, to study women writers alongside canonical figures like Joyce.
Male successors often saw Joyce through rivalry - almost a nightmare from which to awake, as he put it. Women writers, by contrast, drew on his legacy as a source of possibility. Why? Historically, men faced fewer barriers, while women had to struggle to gain even basic rights. Divorce was only introduced in Ireland in 1997; abortion followed after the 2018 referendum.
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So I don’t think women suffer much from an Oedipus complex. We’re not trying to kill our parents, but to continue the battles of our mothers - like Edna O’Brien, whose debut novel was burned publicly for daring to tell the truth about women’s lives - and of our fathers, like Joyce, whose female characters Gerty MacDowell and Molly Bloom reminded readers: “Hey, women have desires too.”
Today, Irish literature is thriving, with women writers such as Sally Rooney and Claire Keegan earning international acclaim. But rights must never be taken for granted; they can be rolled back - from the United States to Afghanistan - and future generations may forget what things were like before. You have to pass through darkness to see the light, though clouds are never far away, as the Irish sky reminds us every day. For Irish women writers, Joyce was never a shadow but a light. The challenge now is to make sure that light continues to shine on them, too.
Annalisa Mastronardi is the author of James Joyce’s Legacies in Contemporary Irish Women Writers (Routledge)
