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.