"Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind."

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

James Joyce and Nora Barnacle, seated on a wall in Zurich. Image from the UB James Joyce Collection 

Today is Letter Writing Day, and it makes me think about how letters used to carry more than words. They carried longing, apology, desire, and sometimes the rawest form of love. One of the most fascinating windows into this truth lies in the private letters between Irish writer James Joyce and his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle.

How it Started

Junction between Nassau and Grafton Street, Dublin 1900s. Source: Wikimedia commons

In June 1904, James Joyce, then twenty-two, spotted a young woman walking along Nassau Street in Dublin. She was Nora Barnacle, a Galway girl working as a chambermaid. Joyce was so taken by her that he asked her out immediately. Nora agreed, but when the time came, she never appeared. Joyce later wrote to her in disappointment:

“I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me—if you have not forgotten me!”

His persistence paid off. Soon after, they met properly on June 16, a date Joyce later immortalized in Ulysses. That evening became the beginning of a love story that would endure decades of distance, hardship, and passion.

James Joyce and Muse, Nora Barnacle. Source: Pinterest



The Letters

Don’t believe it when people say we are the most sex-crazed generation. If you think romance in the early 1900s was prim and proper, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle’s letters will prove you wrong.

In late 1909, Joyce was in Dublin, trying to launch Ireland’s first cinema, the Volta Electric Theatre and working to get Dubliners published. Meanwhile, Nora stayed in Trieste, caring for their children. The distance between them sparked a series of letters that reveal the private side of one of literature’s greatest writers. Sadly, Nora’s replies have been lost, but Joyce’s letters survive, later compiled in the now out-of-print Selected Letters of James Joyce (1975).

In these letters, Joyce is far from the untouchable literary genius of Ulysses. He comes across as a restless, yearning man—obsessive, insecure, and entirely unfiltered. His words swing from tender apologies to shocking erotic confessions, from intimate longing to almost wild declarations of desire.

Joyce’s letters to Nora were not clean or careful. They were raw, desperate, sometimes shockingly erotic. Here are some excerpts:

3 December 1909: 44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

My darling little convent-girl,

There is some star too near the earth for I am still in a fever-fit of animal desire. Today I stopped short often in the street with an exclamation whenever I thought of the letters I wrote you last night and the night before. They must read awful in the cold light of day. Perhaps their coarseness has disgusted you. I know you are a much finer nature than your extraordinary lover and though it was you yourself, you hot little girl, who first wrote to me saying that you were longing to be fucked by me yet I suppose the wild filth and obscenity of my reply went beyond all bounds of modesty. When I got your express letter this morning and saw how careful you are of your worthless Jim I felt ashamed of what I had written. Yet now, night, secret sinful night, has come down again on the world and I am alone again writing to you and your letter is again folded before me on the table. Do not ask me to go to bed, dear. Let me write to you, dear.

As you know, dearest, I never use obscene phrases in speaking. You have never heard me, have you, utter an unfit word before others. When men tell in my presence here filthy or lecherous stories I hardly smile. Yet you seem to turn me into a beast. It was you yourself, you naughty shameless girl who first led the way. It was not I who first touched you long ago down at Ringsend. It was you who slid your hand down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers, and gradually took it all, fat and stiff as it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes. It was your lips too which first uttered an obscene word. I remember well that night in bed in Pola. Tired of lying under a man one night you tore off your chemise violently and began to ride me up and down. Perhaps the horn I had was not big enough for you for I remember that you bent down to my face and murmured tenderly ‘Fuck up, love! fuck up, love!’

My darling Nora, I am panting with eagerness to get your replies to these filthy letters of mine. I write to you openly because I feel now that I can keep my word with you.

Don’t be angry, dear, dear, Nora, my little wild-flower of the hedges. I love your body, long for it, dream of it.

Speak to me, dear lips that I have kissed in tears. If this filth I have written insults you bring me to my senses again with the lash as you have done before. God help me!

I love you, Nora, and it seems that this too is part of my love. Forgive me! forgive me!

Source: Alchetron 

8 December 1909: 44 Fontenoy Street, Dublin

My sweet little whorish Nora,

I did as you told me, you dirty little girl, and pulled myself off twice when I read your letter. I am delighted to see that you do like being fucked arseways. Yes, now I can remember that night when I fucked you for so long backwards. It was the dirtiest fucking I ever gave you, darling. My prick was stuck up in you for hours, fucking in and out under your upturned rump. I felt your fat sweaty buttocks under my belly and saw your flushed face and mad eyes. At every fuck I gave you your shameless tongue come bursting out through your lips and if I gave you a bigger stronger fuck than usual fat dirty farts came spluttering out of your backside. You had an arse full of farts that night, darling, and I fucked them out of you, big fat fellows, long windy ones, quick little merry cracks and a lot of tiny little naughty farties ending in a long gush from your hole. It is wonderful to fuck a farting woman when every fuck drives one out of her. I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have. It is sudden and dry and dirty like what a bold girl would let off in fun in a school dormitory at night. I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.

You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep dressed, steal over me with a whore’s glow in your slumbrous eyes, gently undo button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover’s fat mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in your mouth. Sometime too I shall surprise you asleep, lift up your skirts and open your hot drawers gently, then lie down gently by you and begin to lick lazily round your bush. You will begin to stir uneasily then I will lick the lips of my darling’s cunt. You will begin to groan and grunt and sigh and fart with lust in your sleep. Then I will lick up faster and faster like a ravenous dog until your cunt is a mass of slime and your body wriggling wildly.

Goodnight, my little farting Nora, my dirty little fuckbird! There is one lovely word, darling, you have underlined to make me pull myself off better. Write me more about that and yourself, sweetly, dirtier, dirtier.

The letters went from fire-filled confessions to soft apologies.  

In one, after a quarrel, he wrote gently:

My sweet darling girl,

At last you write to me! I am so spent that I will need your touch to stir me again. When I return, I want every moment with you—dressed or undressed, in the kitchen, on the stairs, anywhere—your hands, your body, your fire. Basta! Basta per Dio!

We are not open yet. I send you some posters. We hope to open on the 20th or 21st. Count 14 days from that and 3 1/2 days for the voyage, and I am in Trieste.

Get ready, darling. Make the home warm and comfortable for your lazy lover. I shall spend the whole week there reading, talking, watching you, and delighting in our life. O how supremely happy I shall be!

A hundred thousand kisses, darling!

JIM

In yet another, he pleaded and adored at the same time:

 “My darling, I long to be clasped in your arms again. I think of nothing but you.”

Reading them, you see all the sides of love. He was jealous, passionate, needy, playful, and endlessly obsessed with Nora. He could beg one day and curse the next. But in every line, she was the center of his world.

Love in All Its Mess

Joyce signed his letters as “Jim,” a casual, intimate version of his name that let him shed the public persona of the famous writer and reveal the playful, vulnerable, and passionate lover behind the pages. 

What I love about these letters is how human they are. The fights, the jealousy, the longing, the making up. We recognize these things in our own lives, but Joyce wrote them with an honesty most of us are too shy to put on paper.

Joyce’s eye is covered in most of their pictures together due to lifelong eye problems and recovery from multiple surgeries. Joyce suffered from chronic eye infections and near-blindness in one eye, often requiring bandages or patches, which explains images showing him with one eye covered.

Nora did write, though many of her letters are missing, according to some sources. Despite this, Joyce’s voice dominated their correspondence, and her presence and words deeply influenced his work. Even Molly Bloom in Ulysses is said to echo Nora’s voice, showing how her influence shaped his art.

Why Letters Still Matter

In a world of quick texts and disappearing messages, Joyce’s letters remind us of what writing once was. A letter took time. You thought before you wrote. And once sent, it stayed. A record of love in all its beauty and its mess.

That’s why Letter Writing Day matters. A letter is not just words on paper. It is presence across distance. It is saying: here is my heart, keep it.

So maybe instead of another text, write a letter today. Joyce knew something we often forget. The truest part of us might be hidden in what we write to one person alone.

References 

1. Joyce, James. Selected Letters of James Joyce. Edited by Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1975. Out of print, but excerpts available online.

2. Excerpts published in The Paris Review, “James Joyce: Letters to Nora Barnacle.” 

3. Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

4. Stancliffe, J. “The Love Letters of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle.” Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 12, No. 4, 1986. 

5. Bowker, Gordon. James Joyce: A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992.

6. Kiberd, Declan. Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Modernist Dublin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.

7. Attridge, Derek. The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

8. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind.” Source: Collected Letters of Goethe.

9. International Letter Writing Day: https://www.un.org/en/observances/letter-writing-day