Willie Mulvagh (1881 - 195?) was the lover of

Nora Barnacle Nora Barnacle (21 March 1884 – 10 April 1951) was the muse and wife of Irish author James Joyce. Barnacle and Joyce had their first romantic assignation in 1904 on a date celebrated worldwide as the "Bloomsday" of his modernist novel '' ...

. Mulvagh was born in Mary Street,

Galway Galway ( ; ga, Gaillimh, ) is a city in the West of Ireland, in the province of Connacht, which is the county town of County Galway. It lies on the River Corrib between Lough Corrib and Galway Bay, and is the sixth most populous city on ...

, and worked in the town's mineral water company as an accountant. One day he accosted Nora on O'Brien's Bridge and asked her to go out with him. Initially unattracted, Nora accepted his offer as young women needed to be accompanied to the local dances, and Nora and her friends loved dancing. However, in turn of the century Galway it was not acceptable for Catholic girls to be courted by Protestant boys. Subterfuge was necessitated, aided by Nora's friend, Mary. Mulvagh has become well known by readers of

Molly Bloom Molly Bloom is a fictional character in the 1922 novel '' Ulysses'' by James Joyce. The wife of main character Leopold Bloom, she roughly corresponds to Penelope in the ''Odyssey''. The major difference between Molly and Penelope is that while P ...

's monologue in ''

Ulysses Ulysses is one form of the Roman name for Odysseus, a hero in ancient Greek literature. Ulysses may also refer to: People * Ulysses (given name), including a list of people with this name Places in the United States * Ulysses, Kansas * Ulysse ...

'' with the line ''"Mulveys was the first."'' What exactly he was the first to do remains unknown. Brenda Maddox speculates that ''"it seems as if Willie Mulvagh may have been the first to instruct Nora in the art of pleasing a man without losing her virtue ... posterity is entitled to suspect that the young man from the mineral water factory and Nora Barnacle ventured further in their embraces than Nora revealed to her girlfriend waiting the Abbey Church's pews."'' The immediate result of this was a severe punishing of Nora by her uncle Tommy Healy; he beat her with his thorn stick until she fell. Nora later gave this as the main reason for her decision to run away to

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of the Wicklow Mountains range. At the 2016 c ...

. Mulvagh himself converted to marry his Catholic wife three years later, as did his brothers. However, he never forgot Nora:

"Twice a widower, Willie lived on until the 1950s and in his last years made his home in England with his daughter. He was a silent man who never spoke about his past, never read books and had not the faintest idea that he was in ''
Ulysses Ulysses is one form of the Roman name for Odysseus, a hero in ancient Greek literature. Ulysses may also refer to: People * Ulysses (given name), including a list of people with this name Places in the United States * Ulysses, Kansas * Ulysse ...
''. His daughter was all the more startled one day, therefore, when Willie looked up from his newspaper, his memory apparently jogged by something he had read, and asked "James Joyce? Didn't he marry a Galway girl by the name of Barnacle?"

References

*''Nora: A Biography of Nora Joyce'', p. 32, 33, 34, 269, 269n, 497, Brenda Maddox,

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

, 1988. 1881 births 1950s deaths Converts to Roman Catholicism People from County Galway {{Ireland-bio-stub