From Richard Ellmann’s biography James Joyce:
To any other writer of the time, Nora Barnacle would have seemed ordinary; Joyce, with his need to seek the remarkable in the commonplace, decided she was nothing of the sort. She had only a grammar school education; she had no understanding of literature, and no power of or interest in introspection. But she had considerable wit and spirit, a capacity for terse uteterance as good in its kind as Stephen Dedalus’s. Along with a strain of coquetry she wore an air of insulated innocence, and, if her allegiance would always be a little mocking, it would nevertheless thoroughgoing. She could not be an intellectual companion, but Joyce was not inclined to care. Though his compatriots Yeats and Lady Gregory might prate of symbolic marriages of the artist and the peasantry, here was a living union. Purer than he, she could receive his litanies, and better still, his confidences.
