Nora

Pat Murphy's third feature film, Nora (2000), is based on Brenda Maddox's 1988 biography of Nora Barnacle, the wife of James Joyce. The film is on one level a sumptuous historical romance, on another a feminist biopic, on yet another a complex meditation on the relationship between high modernist art and ordinary human relationships. It challenges the ways in which history and sexuality have been constructed in Irish films throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Both the literary biography and the film of Nora explore the nature of sexual and aesthetic freedom. But whereas Maddox's biography illuminates an independent minded and resilient woman, Murphy's film also offers both a feminist and post-modern critique of the ethics and aesthetics of modernism. Gerardine Meaney investigates the complex relationships between these two texts, and locates the film in the context of new developments in costume drama and historical film in the 1990s.

Review of the Ireland into Film series: "Each writer has also done an impressive amount of new archive research, which greatly enhances the series' value as fim history and film research. The volumes give full production details and where possible, contain good background interviews with writers and directors .Each volume is lavishly illustrated so that as well as providing good detailed information on the films and an engaged debate about adaptation in general, the series is also an excellent value for the collector."

Gerardine Meaney is Lecturer in Film Studies in English at University College, Dublin. She is the author of (Un)Like Subjects: Women, Theory, Fiction (Routledge, 1993) and is an editor of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes IV and V: Irish Women's Writing and Traditions (Cork UP, 2002)