Dr Clare Hutton discusses the women who supported James Joyce and the publication of his landmark novel in a new BBC Arena documentary. ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses’ will air Wednesday 7th September at 9pm on BBC Two. Also available on BBC iPlayer shortly after broadcast: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001bvp2
One hundred years after its publication, this film reveals the tawdry, shocking, poetic, uplifting and gloriously kaleidoscopic humanity of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses.
The documentary celebrates the crucial role of women, including Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, a lesbian couple who risked being sent to jail for printing obscene material in America; Sylvia Beach, the American in Paris, who published the first edition from her bookshop Shakespeare and Co; Harriet Shaw Weaver, the English heiress who gave Joyce over one million pounds; and Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s wife, muse and the model for his character Molly Bloom.
Have you attended our Women and the Making of Joyce’s Ulysses exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center? Have you attended one of our affiliated events, either online or in person? (See full list below.)
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Dr Clare Hutton (Loughborough University) delivering her Bloomsday Lecture: “‘a gaud of amber beads’: Ulysses, Feminism and Biography”.
Named after Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Joyce, observed annually on 16 June, the day Ulysses takes place in 1904.
On Bloomsday (June 16 2022), Dr Clare Hutton and the Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin) collaborated to deliver an afternoon of Joycean celebration. Audiences gathered for guided tours of the exhibition Women and the Making of Joyce’s Ulysses and a lecture by Hutton: “‘a gaud of amber beads’: Ulysses, Feminism and Biography”.
Watch Hutton’s lecture on demand here.
Following this, the audience enjoyed an exclusive film screening of BBC Arena’s feature-length documentary: James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Dr Clare Hutton (Loughborough University) guides Ambassador Mulhall through the ‘Women and the Making of Ulysses’ exhibition (30 April, Harry Ransom Center)
On 30 April 2022, the Irish Ambassador to the United States visited ‘Women and the Making of Joyce’s Ulysses’ at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. This is a major Ulysses exhibition curated by Dr Clare Hutton, Reader in English and Digital Humanities, Loughborough.
The exhibition is sponsored by the Irish government, and highlights the role which women played in enabling Joyce to write and publish Ulysses, a work which is regarded as the most important and successfully experimental novel of the twentieth century.
Ambassador Mulhall gave a lecture on ‘Molly, Gerty and Mrs Breen: The Women of Joyce’s Ulysses‘ based on his recent book (Ulysses: A Reader’s Odyssey, 2022) while Dr Hutton gave a lecture entitled ‘”Smart lady typists”: Ulysses and the Women Behind the Scenes’ based on the exhibition, and her monograph, Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review (OUP, 2019). She also introduced the premier of a 25 minute documentary entitled Remarkable Women: The Story of Ulysses which includes an interview with her about the thinking behind the exhibition.
Dr Steve Enniss, Director of the Ransom Center, said ‘it is an honour to be able to welcome Ambassador Mulhall to the HRC, home of an unrivalled Joyce collection, and a place which many researchers of the Irish literary tradition have visited in order to consult our outstanding collections and manuscripts.
Ambassador Mulhall said ‘in this year when we celebrate both the centenary of Joyce’s Ulysses and the foundation of the Irish state, it is wonderful to see the innovative way in which Joyce’s work is being celebrated. Women clearly played a formative role in helping Joyce to find a way forward. His publishers, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap and Sylvia Beach, and Harriet Shaw Weaver were clearly crucial to the success of Ulysses’.
Dr Hutton says she is ‘honoured by the support of the Irish Department for Foreign Affairs. Even with Covid and the practical challenges which the pandemic has posed for work of this kind, the exhibition has been a pleasure to work on, and I am delighted that it is attracting so many visitors back to the Ransom Center after the prolonged closures of 2020 and 2021. I am also very pleased that the emphasis on under acknowledged female labour is proving to be so popular with visitors.
On 21st April 2022, the James Joyce Centre (Dublin) hosted an online conversation between Lucy Brennan Shiel, Susan Leybourne, Marion Byrne, and Clare Hutton, reflecting upon Harriet Shaw Weaver’s important and complex role in the creation and patronage of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). Hosted by Darina Gallagher (Director of the James Joyce Centre), the event explored the speakers’ memorial tributes to Weaver in the light of Ulysses‘ 100th anniversary. These included a short film, ‘Weaver of the Wind’ by Brennan Shiel,The Ulysses 100 project e-book by Leybourne and Byrne, and Hutton’s ‘Women and the Making of Ulysses‘ exhibition (showing until 17th July, The Harry Ransom Centre, TX). Watch the full event above.
Harriet Shaw Weaver (1876–1961) was a noted feminist and littérateur who became associated with Joyce in 1914 when she serialised his work in The Egoist magazine. Independently wealthy, within a few years she began giving Joyce significant financial support in order to complete Ulysses. She also typed and checked manuscripts, undertook to become his publisher in England, and gave other practical assistance, particularly in respect of his health and the support of his family.
Without Weaver’s support, Ulysses might never have seen the light of day. Weaver’s papers are held at the British Library, and are one of the world’s most important Joyce archives. The materials document the emotionally and financially complicated relationship behind Ulysses. This talk by Dr Clare Hutton looks at some of the key objects in the archive and sheds new light on Weaver and the making of Ulysses.
Dr Clare Hutton is Reader in English and Digital Humanities at Loughborough University, and the curator of Women and the Making of Joyce’s Ulysses, a centenary exhibition currently on display at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.
Without Weaver’s support, Ulysses might never have seen the light of day.
Dr Clare Hutton (Loughborough University)
Dr Clare Hutton (Loughborough University) gave a public lecture for the British Library on the 10 March 2022, exploring the relationship between James Joyce and Harriet Shaw Weaver (1876–1961), a noted feminist and littérateur. Independently wealthy, Weaver gave Joyce significant financial support in order to complete Ulysses. She also typed and checked manuscripts, undertook to become his publisher in England, and gave other practical assistance, particularly in respect of his health and the support of his family.
Weaver’s papers are held at the British Library, and are one of the world’s most important Joyce archives. The materials document the emotionally and financially complicated relationship behind Ulysses. Hutton’s talk examined several of the key objects in the archive to shed new light on Weaver and the making of Ulysses.
The lecture complements Hutton’s exhibition at the Harry Ransom Centre, Women and the Making of Ulysses (open now – 17 July 2022).
Literary genius is not a solo thing […] Joyce cultivated a view of himself as a troubled artist being thwarted by hapless publishers and difficult material circumstances. The truth is far more complicated. The women behind the scenes really made the achievement of Ulysses possible.
Dr Clare Hutton (Loughborough University)
Read Sightlines magazine’s latest review of the Women and the Making of Ulysses exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center. In this article, Dorothy Meiburg Weller interviews the exhibition curator, Dr Clare Hutton, to discover the complicated truth behind the collaborative creation of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses (1922).
Marking the moment when James Joyce’s Ulysses turns 100, Dr Clare Hutton (Loughborough University), introduces some of the key ideas, objects, and people featured in the Ransom Center’s centenary exhibition Women and the Making of Joyce’s Ulysses.
This landmark work of literary modernism owes a considerable debt to the silent behind-the-scenes labour of three gay American women: Margaret Anderson, Sylvia Beach, and Jane Heap as well as that of British publisher Harriet Shaw Weaver. What did these women do to facilitate the making of the work? What actually happened on February 2, 1922? Who were the first readers of Ulysses? How did they obtain their copies and what did they make of the book?
To find out more about the exhibition, including location and opening dates, click below.
On 1 February 2022, in celebration of Ireland’s great female patron saint, St Brigid, The Embassy of Ireland (London) showcased the efforts of talented Irish women, both historic and contemporary. In one of three fascinating panels upon women in sport, women in climate science, and women and James Joyce, Dr Clare Hutton presented her research into the influence of Joyce’s mother upon the novelist’s success.
