About the lecture
At different moments in her long life, Harriet Shaw Weaver (1876-1961) was James Joyce’s editor, publisher, financial patron and unofficial agent.
Drawing on her long-term research, Professor Hutton will discuss the kinds of challenge Weaver poses for biography, and the necessity of recovering Weaver’s significance.
Weaver was five years older than Joyce, and outlived him by more than twenty years. She was significantly involved in managing his affairs posthumously, including as executor of his estate, and as guardian to his daughter Lucia Joyce.
An enigmatic figure, Weaver was demure, private and self-effacing by nature, and never wrote a memoir. Thus, it is hard to get a sense of her as a person, of how she felt about her association with Joyce, and of the structuring intimacies of her daily life.
Professor Hutton’s Inaugural Lecture will review key objects and facts uncovered in recent research, and show how feminist biography involves becoming a kind of literary detective, reading from inference, and from small scraps, gaps and silences.
About the lecturer
Clare Hutton's research specialism is James Joyce, the Irish Literary Revival and twentieth century book history.
She is interested in the roles that editors, agents, publishers, reviewers and readers can play in creating meaning. Her monograph, Serial Encounters: Ulysses and the Little Review (OUP, 2019), looked at the cultural and textual significance of the serial version of James Joyce's Ulysses.
Originally published in the Little Review, an avant-garde journal, Joyce's Ulysses attracted controversy from the outset. It led to the prosecution of the journal's editors on grounds of the text's obscenity.
Whether it was the editors or the text which should have been charged remains open to question, and it was this kind of issue which underpinned Hutton's curatorship of Women and the Making of Ulysses, a major international exhibition at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas in 2022.
Her Penguin edition of Joyce's Poems is in press, and she is currently completing a monograph on the Textual Culture of the Irish Literary Revival. Earlier work included editing Volume Five of the Oxford History of the Irish Book (2011).
For further information on this lecture, please contact the Events team.
