 Welcome to the British Library. In the centenary year of James Joyce's Ulysses, we at the library are delighted to present this exploration of a unique archive housed at the library that shared special life on the career, work and personal circumstances of the author. Our speaker today is Dr Clare Hutton. Clare is reader in English and digital humanities at Loughborough University and is the curator of women and the making of Joyce's Ulysses, a centenary exhibition at the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas. She is the author of Serial Encounters, Ulysses and the Little Review and editor of the Irish Book in English, 1891-2000. Those of you watching the event live may be interested to know that we have a very exciting conversation coming up about Joyce and his legacy between two of Ireland's finest writers, Anne Enright and Eamor McBride and they'll be appearing here in person at the British Library on the 24th of March and the event will also be available as a live stream. There's a small display marking the centenary of Ulysses and that's running in the library's treasures gallery until the 31st of May and it features original notes by Joyce, documents from Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw and the first published edition of Ulysses. For now, enjoy the lecture. James Joyce's Ulysses was published 100 years ago and is widely regarded as a landmark work in English literature. The book is relentlessly specific about One Day in Dublin, 16th of June 1904. But Ulysses has attracted readers and enthusiasts across many national borders. In a moment of doubt when he was finishing Ulysses, Joyce had wondered whether he had tried to do too much in this work. But the verdict of literary history has been very positive. Ulysses is revered for many reasons. For example, it reveals new possibilities for the form of the novel and demonstrates stream of consciousness as a narrative technique. Joyce was a pioneer in a new kind of very detailed psychological realism, which we can see in the vivid characterisation of Stephen Dedalus and Molly and Leopold Bloom, the three main characters. Ulysses is also known for its stylistic extremity and innovation, for the way in which the latter chapters of the work take issue with the earlier, more naturalistic chapters. It's famous for its intertextual layering and for the interpretive challenges it's thrown out to generations of readers. It's noted for being quite exceptionally candid about the functions of the human body. In fact, there were two legal cases about the novel. The serial version of Ulysses was deemed obscene by a New York court in February 1921 before Joyce had even finished the writing. This meant that Ulysses could not freely circulate within the US until a decision of December 1933 ruled that Ulysses was not pornographic and that Joyce was sincere and honest in showing how the minds of his characters operate. Ulysses was first published in Paris by an American, Sylvia Beach, who ran a small bookshop and lending library named Shakespeare & Company. This is the title page in cover of that iconic first edition, which appeared on Joyce's 40th birthday, 2 February 1922. Ulysses would have been a very different book had Beach not been so generous in her support. She'd instructed the printer to supply Joyce with all the proofs he wanted. Joyce spent seven months working on the proofs and expanded the work considerably at that stage. Beach was determined to make Ulysses a success partly because of the difficulties Joyce had faced in the attempt to produce the work in Britain and the US. She simply would not allow Ulysses to be censored and she allowed Joyce to play a significant role in designing the look and feel of this iconic first edition, which looked like this. He chose the typeface, Elsevier, and specified the colour of the paper cover. The turquoise blue of the Greek flag is intended as a subtle reminder of the book's relationship to Greek literature, to Homer's Odyssey specifically. The story of Shakespeare & Company is well known and has been romanticized within literary history. There's something very enchanting about this narrative of an American in Paris coming to the aid of the floundering Ulysses. But we might reasonably say that there would have been no Ulysses to publish had it not been for the generous intervention, practical help and service of another female publisher, Harriet Shaw Weaver. Weaver worked quietly and tirelessly behind the scenes in London where she was the editor of The Egoist, the modernist journal in which a portrait of the artist as a young man first appeared. Joyce was certain of his own genius and was particularly adept at securing practical and financial support from women. His relationship with Weaver beginning in 1914 is the most important and long-lasting professional relationship in his life. But it's not easy to understand Weaver's significance because she was endlessly demure, private and self-effacing. Her motivation in helping Joyce so very significantly is not entirely easy to understand. Her kindness is a kind of enigma. Weaver was British and came from a culturally elite background. What did she see in Joyce in his literary works and in the formation of his Irish nationalism? What kinds of political views did she hold? How did Joyce have the good fortune to find Miss Weaver? How can her identity, character and achievement be recovered into the present moment? The British Library holds a remarkable archive of her papers which she donated before she died at the age of 85 in 1961. Joyce was five years younger than Weaver who was born in 1876 and he died suddenly in 1941 at the age of just 59. So Weaver outlived him by 20 years and was extremely helpful to Joyce scholars who sought her out in the period between his death and 1961. She made typed transcripts of the hundreds of letters she'd received from Joyce between 1914 and 1941, thus providing the foundations for the biography written by Richard Ellman and published in 1959. Her papers remain a primary source for any scholar interested in the detail of Joyce's life. What I want to do in this talk is to think about the archive from another perspective, not for what it reveals about Joyce but instead for what it reveals about Weaver. Doing this involves reading and extrapolating from tiny hints, tiny details, becoming a kind of literary detective, looking for small clues in a sea of information. A feminist literary history often involves this kind of reading, a reading from inference, from small scraps, gaps, silences. This photograph was taken in October 1916, just after Weaver had turned 40 and two years after she'd become acquainted with Joyce through his writing. Weaver began serialising a portrait of the artist as a young man in The Egoist in February 1914. It was Ezra Pound who'd strongly encouraged Weaver to support Joyce by publishing portrait. When the serialisation of portrait came to an end, Weaver turned book publisher in order to issue the work in London. She did this because she couldn't find a London printer or publisher willing to print Joyce's text without insisting on deletions. It's not entirely clear what the London publishers objected to, but in all likelihood it was things like the vivid blasphemy of the Christmas dinner scene, the scene involving prostitutes and Joyce's open depiction of the squalid quarter of the brothels. This offended the social mores and old-fashioned attitudes of the literary establishment. Weaver stepped into the breach and there's a kind of steadfast calmness and equanimity in her look here, a sort of unruffled, unflappable steeliness looking straight to camera. Weaver didn't marry or have children and the fact that she did not make those commitments made being in the workplace possible. She had a significant social circle and many deep friendships, but there seemed to be moments of significant loneliness. Weaver and Joyce did not meet in person until the summer of 1922 after Ulysses had been published. In their correspondence before that meeting they exchanged photos and in one letter accompanying photos she describes herself as being very old but taking pleasure from being credited still with something of youth. She confesses to certain moods in which the thought of my great age weighs upon me and depresses me. My sense is that she may have been reflecting on the shaping impact of fertility and reckoning with the structure of a female life without the significant and shaping impact of children. Weaver came from a large family. She was the sixth of eight children and by the time she was in her forties she had several nieces and nephews. Her parents were conservative low Anglicans who said prayers twice a day, did not approve of people going to the theatre and were motivated by giving to the poor, by social work more generally and providing medical care and support. Her father was a doctor and her mother was independently wealthy with an inherited fortune amassed through the cotton trade. From age 15 the family lived in Hampstead in a household which included six servants and the daughters were not expected to earn a living and thus Weaver was not allowed to go to university. There was no need for her to pursue a profession for its own sake. Instead she undertook charitable work of various kinds and various evening classes including some at the London School of Economics. From the early 1910 she became interested in the suffrage movement and it was this which led her into the world of publishing. First to a journal called The Free Woman which had the subtitle A Weekly Feminist Review. Within a few years this had been renamed The Egoist, an editorial move which signalled a more general commitment to freedom of thought and a belief in the rights of the individual. It's not entirely easy to tell how strong Weaver's feminist beliefs were. Certainly feminism was part of her identity but she was a gentle and quiet person by instinct and in respect of suffrage she was more inclined to gentle persuasion than militant agitation. This is the first surviving letter from Joyce to Weaver and dates from November 1914 by which time the serialisation of a portrait in The Egoist had been well established. The outbreak of World War I in July 1914 put Joyce in a precarious position. Triest, where he lived, was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Joyce, as a British subject, was an enemy alien. This is communicated in the ominous reference to the Austrian authorities and his hope that he shall remain at liberty. In spite of such fears Joyce is keen to reassure Weaver that he's posted the two final chapters of the portrait. I hope he says you will receive them safely. It's very kind of you to take so much trouble in the matter. Any letter forwarded to me should be in Italian or German and preferably in an open envelope and quite formal. During the war ordinary postal service was disrupted between Triest and London. Thus this letter was sent from Venice in nearby Italy. Joyce says thanks to a kindness of a friend there. Italy had remained neutral in the war but still the letter was opened, examined and resealed by the censor in Britain as we can see from the envelope. Joyce's precarity and his utter focus on getting portrait into print is evident in the letter. But what would it have been like to actually receive it? Joyce is putting his new publisher under a certain amount of psychological, administrative and political pressure saying that a reply should be in Italian or German should be aware of the Austrian authorities. Weaver had in hand the remarkable opening chapters of portrait and now received the two closing chapters, the extraordinarily vivid and compelling evocations of Stevens' later teens and university years, his break with Catholicism, his epiphanies and maturing as an artist. On the one hand the letter evokes the context at the present, the war, the imminent threat to Joyce's liberty. On the other hand, the letter evokes the world of the work and it reveals Joyce's extraordinary ability to concentrate on the minute particulars of portrait even when his whole way of life is threatened, his liberty, his artistic freedom. The sense of threat in Trieste was very real. Joyce's brother Stanislaus, who also lived in Trieste, was interned by the Austrian authorities and spent the war in a camp. Joyce was luckier and at this crucial juncture in his life he may have understood the need for being diplomatic. He was given the opportunity to leave Trieste and did so making his way to Zurich in neutral Switzerland in mid-June 1915. Inspired by the encouragement he was getting from Weaver, Joyce had made a start with Ulysses and had two draft chapters in hand by the time he arrived in Zurich. His early years in Zurich were unsettled and difficult. The move was rapid and unplanned and he could not easily resume his ordinary way of making money by teaching English. It was in this context an a sense of emergency and crisis that Weaver began to give Joyce money. As the publisher of Portrait, which he'd read slowly over the course of 25 instalments, she was utterly convinced of Joyce's genius. Portrait is a book that bears slow and sustained close reading. A book with the terror of clarity that its pound observed. Hard, clear cut with no waste of words. Initially Weaver gave Joyce sums for things like serial rights to Portrait, but from May 1917 she began to give Joyce the more substantial sum of £50 per quarter. This was more like an income and she gave it anonymously through a firm of solicitors in London. Weaver was reserved and private by nature and did not wish to confuse her role as financial patron with her identity as Joyce's editor and publisher. In the period to July 1919, when Joyce was working intensely on Ulysses, he had no idea that Weaver was the source of income and several cash gifts. Weaver did not really want anyone to know about the full extent of her financial generosity. When Joyce's letters were being prepared for publication in the 1950s, she controlled the process by providing typed copies of the originals. She allowed for some letters to be published in full, some letters to be published with deletions, and others she withheld from publication completely. So this is an example of one of the unpublished letters which Joyce sent in acknowledging a gift sent via Ezra Pound. Here's the text in a slightly more enlarged form. So the letter is dated the 29th to July 1916, and it reads, Dear Sir or Madam, Mr Ezra Pound has sent me your generous donation of £20, for which I wish to express my deepest thanks. The gift is very welcome to me in present uncertain circumstances, but even more so in that it is an encouragement. The delicate manner in which it has been made does not allow me to thank as I should wish to do. Nevertheless, I beg you to believe that I am much moved by your generous sympathy, which I may say I have done so little to deserve. Except again my thanks and believe me to be sincerely and gratefully yours, James Joyce. For someone like Weaver, this was thanks enough, and there's something quite beguiling about Joyce's politeness. You can see the Jesuit manner shining through, the self-deprecation, the reference to the donor's delicate manner and generous sympathy, and the signal that he takes the gift as an encouragement to continue working in uncertain circumstances. These are the notes that are sounded again and again on published letters to Weaver, that he's unworthy of the generosity, that his need is great, that the gift will encourage him to continue, and that he's extremely grateful. Letters of this kind hardened Weaver's determination to smooth the path for Joyce. Once she began to get a sense of his progress with Ulysses, she wanted to make arrangements for its publication in England, armed with the completed typescripts of the first four chapters of Ulysses. She visited Virginia Woolf in April 1918 in order to see whether her newly established Hogarth Press could publish Joyce's work. This letter is Woolf's response, in which she indicates that the aim of the Hogarth Press is to produce writing of merit which the ordinary publisher refuses. She firmly turns down Ulysses, citing the length of projected 300 pages as a matter of insuperable difficulty for a press with such limited printing equipment. This was far from candid. Woolf told another correspondent that she would hesitate to put the typescript into the hands of even a married woman. The directness of the language and the choice of the incidents, if there is any such choice, have raised a blush even upon such a cheek as mine. One might imagine that Woolf and Weaver would find it easy to get on. After all, they shared an interest in modern literature. They belonged to the same elite social class, and they were the same age. But Woolf found it impossible to make sense of Weaver and her motivation in supporting Joyce. Writing in her diary, Woolf described Weaver as inultrably modest, judicious and decorous. Her neat, mauve suit suited both soul and body. Her grey gloves laid straight by her plate symbolised domestic rectitude. Her table manners were those of a well-bred hen. We could get no talk to go. Possibly the poor woman was impeded by her sense that what she had in that brown paper parcel was quite out of keeping with her own contents. But then how did she ever come in contact with Joyce and the rest? Why does their filth seek exit from her mouth? Heaven knows. Ulises, of course, proved to be an extremely important book for the development of Woolf's aesthetic, a fact that can be seen particularly in the structure of Mrs Dalloway. So there's an anxiety of influence just under the surface here. Of the many interesting details in this letter, in particular is the idea that Ulises would be a novel of 300 pages. Weaver must have estimated this on the basis of portrait. She had assumed that Ulises would be a normal novel. She had no real sense that Joyce was developing plans for a much more ambitious, longer work. The circumstances in which he was writing continued to be very unsettled during 1918, but he was renewed by the support of his still anonymous patron. Acting through a firm of solicitors in May 1919, Weaver gave Joyce a gift of £5,000. This was invested securely in a war loan and gave a steady income of £250 per annum. Weaver had been one of thousands of small-time investors who'd responded to the British Government's appeal for capital to pay the considerable costs of keeping an army on the Western Front. Weaver wanted Joyce to have financial independence, believing that this would be the best way of giving free artistic reign to his searching piercing spirit. In the letter of gratitude addressed to the solicitors who were handling the war loan, Joyce tried to guess who his benefactor might be and got it wrong. Weaver was unnerved by the guessing game and revealed herself as the source of his income. Joyce, who sent the message through Monro-Saul and Company, it is rather paralyzing to communicate through solicitors. Joyce suddenly realised his luck in finding Miss Weaver, editor, tireless administrator, patient listener and quite exceptionally generous financial patron. Joyce appears never to have questioned what the war loan had actually funded. Instead, he simply buried himself in his work. The individual chapters of Ulysses would now take four or five months to complete. There's a clear correlation between his decision to write a Ulysses of a much greater length and the arrival of the war loan. The latter chapters became longer. The stylistic experimentation became more extreme. Ulysses, as we know it, came into being. The intensity of Joyce's creative process can be sensed in the surviving manuscripts. This page shows the notes Joyce was amassing for the final chapter, the famous Molly Bloom soliloquy. Joyce was an investment note-taker writing down scraps of phrases, facts, quotations and sayings. He collected notes all the time and then sat down and organised them onto big sheets of paper organised by chapter. He then drew on the note sheets in the process of writing a draft chapter, crossing individual items out and drawing pencil as they were used. For this page of the manuscript, there are three colours being used, red, green and blue. A manuscript like this communicates the aura of creativity, the intense labour involved in producing the work. Ulysses is over 240,000 words. In the final years of his work on the text, Joyce was shielded to some extent by Weaver's financial generosity and steely confidence in his ability. There's no doubt that this kept him going in a process which he described as a seven-year sentence, a form of ingenious torture which would be enough, he said, to upset anyone's mental balance. Using the income which Weaver had so generously supplied, Joyce sent Weaver a telegram on the day that Ulysses was published. To me it's remarkable that this has survived and the act of keeping something, especially something fragile and ephemeral, suggests its value and importance to the recipient. The writing in pencil is simply that of the post office clerk who wrote the message, which was delivered by hand to Weaver's modest second floor rented flat in Marlebone, central London. For a woman with independent means, this was an interesting choice of accommodation. She could easily have bought or rented somewhere more lavish, but her preferred option was to live frugally. A few days later, Joyce followed up by sending Weaver the signed number one copy of Ulysses, the very first in the private edition of 1000, inscribed for her in token of gratitude. This was an extremely significant gestural act and suggests that Weaver was more important for the making and realisation of Ulysses than, say, Nora Barnacle or Sylvia Beach. Though Ulysses had been published in Paris, Weaver remained determined to be Joyce's first publisher in the English-speaking world. The Shakespearean Company first edition was intended as a one-off which would be followed by a London edition published by The Egoist Press once the Parisian edition had sold out. These arrangements, agreed with Sylvia Beach, were set in train in the latter half of 1922. This is the title page of the London Ulysses, which appeared in October 1922 and consisted of 2,000 copies. This was printed in Paris or printed in Dijon by the printers used by Shakespearean company, Maurice Durantier. Weaver had commissioned the writer John Rodger to do the administrative work on the edition in Paris. And thus it's his name which appears on the title page, as we can see in the imprint published for The Egoist Press London by John Rodger, Paris. So it's another way in which, in a sense, she keeps her name off the record. The London edition includes an errata slip correcting some of the errors of the Paris edition but is otherwise the same as the Paris first edition. And it was inconsiderable demand, particularly with orders coming in from the US. Thus Weaver ordered another 500 copies and paid for them, and these were ready by January 1923. It is, however, not really clear how many of the 2,500 copies of the so-called London edition of Ulysses actually survived and made their way to readers. Certainly some copies were intercepted enroute to the US and 499 copies were seized by the customs authorities at Folkstone. One Home Office official described the work as unreadable, unquotable and unreviewable and ordered that copies be detained if ever found in the post. Detention was not quite enough to keep the Home Office happy, however. Ulysses needed to be actually prohibited for its alleged indecency. We may think of Ulysses as a Dublin book but as a much more expansive culture geography. Written in Trieste, Zurich and Paris and published serially in New York by December 1922, Ulysses had landed at the unlikely destination of the Croydon Aerodrome. There a copy was seized by a Mr Fletcher, an official who sought a decision as to whether it is prohibited as being indecent. A Mr Harris, working for the Home Office, perused the novel and decided there could be no doubt about the last chapter, Molly Bloom's infamous soliloquy. In fact this appears to have been the only chapter the Home Office officials actually read. One report complained about Ulysses having no story, no introduction which might give a key to its purpose and the same report went on to complain about the vulgarity, coarseness, unmitigated filth and obscenity. A circular letter went out to the chief constables of large British towns with the order to seize any copy of Ulysses in their districts. Weaver had paid to publish a book which was prohibited from circulation and she found herself having to act in a clandestine way, hiding copies at home in her Marlebone wardrobe, another unlikely place for Ulysses to land. By autumn 1922, Weaver was well established as Joyce's London publisher. She'd re-issued editions of all of his major works, chamber music, Dubliners, Exiles, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and now Ulysses. And as the publisher of Egoist Press she had dedicated considerable financial resource and administrative effort to the publication of Joyce's work. Believing in Joyce's genius, she'd worked hard to create a cultural context in which his works could be appreciated. As publisher particularly of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man she'd created an interest in Joyce within London's literary marketplace. She had created the conditions for Joyce's acceptance, only to find that that acceptance was now to be challenged by the individuals who intercepted Ulysses at the Croydon Aerodrome. There's no doubt that this turn of events must have been extremely vexing for Weaver. Still, she continued to be extremely generous to Joyce. For example, in the period between November 1922 and September 1923 she paid Joyce £1,500 in what the accounts deemed to be royalties. But in fact she'd received few copies of Ulysses that she could actually sell. Her expenditure on Ulysses was well in excess of the income the work generated. By April 1924 Weaver had come to a change of heart. She decided to withdraw from the publishing business completely. With respect to Joyce's works she made the decision to sell the copyright and balance of stock to Jonathan Cape, a more commercially minded literary publisher based in London. The price he paid was a mere £130. Weaver's decision to stop issuing Joyce's other works is not easy to reconcile given that she'd done so much to build his reputation in the literary sphere. And there's no diary or letter which tells us why she did this. But Weaver probably never felt entirely comfortable working in the male dominated world of publishing. She often told Joyce that she was not a professional publisher. Her commitment to publishing had been shaken once her edition of Ulysses was prohibited. Weaver's belief in free speech and commitment to the candor of Ulysses had been stung by the experience of an unwelcome scandal. This did not mean that she withdrew from helping and believing in Joyce. What we can see in the 1920s is evidence of the relationship changing. And in particular it's worth looking at two documents which shed light on the underpinning basis of the relationship. So this note in Weaver's hand is a list of Mr Joyce's illnesses as known to me. And it's dated 1922 and is clearly the meticulous work of a doctor's daughter who knew quite a lot about ill health. And it appears to have been kept over several years and extra details have been added in time. Joyce had significant difficulties with his health, particularly with his eyes and they worsened significantly after the publication of Ulysses. Weaver did much to help and advise him and found doctors in London who could advise. She saw and accepted the level of Joyce's need and she came from a background where a duty to care for people was second nature. As she looked after Joyce through various crises she must also have hoped that he would find a way of continuing to write. Her life was one of settled stability and order and she wanted Joyce to live in that kind of context too, believing that it would help him to go on writing. It's this impulse which lay behind her financial generosity which has not been a particularly easy thing to Joyce's biographers to compute. This single typed page of figures reveals much about Joyce's income. It's a record of regular amounts paid to Joyce by Weaver's solicitors, Monroe Sawan Company, a firm based in London. In sum it shows that Weaver had given Joyce investments to the value of £22,850 in June 1924 when the account was made up. All of these investments were given to Joyce in the period between 1919 and 1923. In the period when he was working on unices and the immediate years thereafter. It's difficult to measure the worth of finances from the past because of the need to have a grasp of typical salaries, prices and labour. In the case of Joyce's income there's the added complication of exchange rate volatility between Sterling and the Frank which was a particular issue during these years. But the Bank of England's purchasing power calculator suggests that Joyce's investments in 1924 would be worth about £1.3 million in Sterling today. Mostly Joyce was receiving a return of about 5% tax-free on his investments, an income of about £66,000 in today's terms. A whole world of finance and behind the scenes arrangements emanates from this document. The owned assets seem to be loans, not shares and are notably colonial in flavour. Joyce's income derived from railways in Canada from government debt in New Zealand, mining interests in South Africa. And these financial arrangements were made with care and attention by someone who understood financial markets and played it safe. What we can see here is the kind of investments made by people such as Weaver who lived off unearned income. Joyce appears never to have made queries about whether the investments were ethical. On the evidence of this document, the income which Joyce derived from Weaver in 1924 was approximately £962. And this might have been sufficient for his needs. In a room of one's own, Wolff's pioneering portrait of writerly life published in 1929, estimated that a woman writer needed 500 a year and a room with a lock on the door in order to write fiction or poetry. Joyce had almost doubled that amount several years earlier and was receiving royalties from Beech, who'd given Joyce an astonishing 66% of the net profits from the first edition and continued to be generous thereafter. From 1924, Joyce was also earning royalties from Jonathan Cape, whose terms were undoubtedly less generous than those afforded to Joyce by Weaver and Beech. So one of the questions which this document raises is where did the money go? How did Joyce dispose of his income? Weaver had scruples about unearned income and was frugal in extremas. Joyce had no such scruples and could be quite extravagant. He drank heavily, ate out on an almost daily basis, lived in expensive furnished apartments within hotels and earned significant and unavoidable medical bills. When financial pinch points arose and they did so regularly, he drew on the capital invested in his name. His estate, valued for probate at the time of his death in 1941, was £980. Weaver's estate, valued for probate at the time of her death in 1961, was £17,618. In other words, she'd given Joyce more capital by 1923 than she herself had almost 40 years later. Several significant questions swirl around the story of Weaver's relationship with Joyce. In particular, it's always been difficult to understand exactly what motivated her kindness. How and why did this demure and extremely reserved upper-class English woman come to support the world's most famous Irish writer? What drew them together? What held them together? There's a sense of profound cultural incongruity here of something not quite fitting. And we can glimpse that in part in the formality of the communication between Joyce, who referred to her as Miss Weaver decades after they'd become acquainted. Part of the sense of non-fit derives from a sense of very different cultural formations. Weaver herself, half in apology, described her identity as unadulterated Saxon. One of the things at stake here is the case of opposites attracting. For someone who was single, reserved, English, Anglican and intensely nervous and ordered about the way in which she ran her life, it must have been a relief to encounter James Joyce's chaos and lack of inhibition. And of course there was the satisfaction of seeing the works from portrait onwards finding their way into print. When Weaver began to give money to Joyce in 1916 she had little sense of the writer he might become or the personal circumstances and health difficulties that would shape his life so significantly. Her steadfast loyalty is notable. Once she'd made the commitment to Joyce's writing she stuck to her guns. She became his general helpmate and a custodian of his papers and Joyce had the good sense of realising the importance of these virtues and appointed her executor. After Joyce's death she became legal guardian and regular visitor to his daughter Lucia who developed schizophrenia in the 1920s. In her responses to queries about Joyce and his works during the 1940s and 50s Weaver was kind and exacting but she did not wish for conversations about money or Lucia to dominate Joyce's biography. She was happy for the significance of her own role to be downplayed. Literary history takes cues from such hints and it's difficult to rewrite a narrative once key strands have been put in place. Weaver was not the kind of person to fuss. She did not wish her caring role in respect of the Joyce family to become a dominant strain in the biography. Memoir plays an important role in the making of a biography. Sylvia Beach wrote a detailed account of her relationship with Joyce and the business of Shakespeare and Company. Margaret Anderson, who first serialised Ulysses in the Little Review also wrote a vivid account of her relationship with the publication of Joyce's work. Weaver was happy to remain in the shadows. She never wrote an account of her relationship with Joyce making her a particularly easy figure to overlook or underestimate. But of all the women associated with the making of Ulysses, Weaver was the most significant. Her support lasted longer and meant more to Joyce. This is not just about the money, though that of course is an important part of the relationship. Weaver listened to Joyce and cared about his family at a deep level. She visited Paris, he visited London. She smoothed out arrangements for him, especially medical appointments and they wrote to each other frequently. There was an emotional and psychological rapport, a mutual and sustaining confidence and trust in each other's judgments, an affinity which stretched well beyond simply defined roles as patron and author. His letters often contained detailed accounts of plans and intentions for his writings. He was clearly confident in her abilities as a reader. Weaver shunned the limelight during her lifetime, but Ulysses seems an apt moment to recover her unique identity from the vast paper trail of the archive. A good moment to recognise her contribution to the creation of Ulysses and to give her the credit she never really sought.