She didn't knowingly help him to write 'Ulysses,' but when you read the biography you realize what an influence she was.

I'm not writing 'Ulysses.'

"Everybody wants to write 'Ulysses,' but if you ask people if anyone has read all of 'Ulysses,' no one has," he continued.

At least he can admire literature without trying his hand out at writing Ulysses.

James Joyce wrote Ulysses, one of the most lauded and least finished novels of the 20th century, between 1914 and 1921.

This year Tennyson writes "Ulysses" (published in 1842).

Ulysses (1922) p. 732 When a young man came up to him in Zurich and said, "May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?"

If Joyce had been arrested then, he would have been unable to write Ulysses in its present form, and that explains his now famous comment to Jolas.

But the man who wrote Ulysses when his grief was fresh could not be suspected of declining into a hypochondriac.

The books went on to inspire others, and her biography A Day with Shakespeare was particularly influential for James Joyce in writing Ulysses.