Review: Sally Rooney’s “Misreading Ulysses”

James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place on June 16th, 1904. On this “Bloomsday” in 2025, I read a compelling T.S. Eliot Lecture delivered at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 2022 by Sally Rooney titled Misreading Ulysses. Rooney offers a personal and provocatively feminist reading of Joyce’s Ulysses. Rather than retreating into the familiar critical territories of mythological parallels or linguistic experimentation, Rooney makes a bold argument: Ulysses belongs not to the masculine literary lineage of Homer and Shakespeare that Joyce so ostentatiously claims, but to the tradition of the English novel—a form fundamentally shaped by women writers.

Rooney’s central insight is that Joyce’s masterpiece, for all its epic pretensions, is essentially a “relational novel” in the tradition established by Jane Austen. Where critics have long emphasized the book’s difficulty and formal innovation, Rooney finds emotional accessibility and recognizably novelistic concerns with love, marriage, and human connection. Leopold Bloom emerges not as a modernist cipher but as an “intriguingly androgynous character” who embodies the novel form’s own synthesis of masculine and feminine literary traditions.

The essay’s strength lies in Rooney’s willingness to read against the grain of established Joyce criticism. Not to diminish the brilliant scholarship of critics like Hugh Kenner, her observation that the novel’s supposedly all-male Dublin systematically excludes women from public spaces offers a sharp feminist perspective rarely applied to Ulysses. She argues that Joyce’s erasure of female literary predecessors—notably Jane Austen, who doesn’t appear in Gifford’s Ulysses Annotated—represents an anxiety about the novel’s feminine origins.

Her personal stake in the reading (“my Ulysses is necessarily enmeshed in the history of the novel, because I approach it as a person who studies novels, reads them for pleasure, and even tries to write them”) gives the essay an engaging intimacy while raising important questions about interpretive authority.

The essay occasionally overreaches—the comparison between Joyce and Austen feels forced at times—but Rooney’s broader point about the novel’s “bisexually abnormal” formal properties is genuinely illuminating. By positioning Ulysses within the tradition of the marriage plot rather than epic poetry, she reveals how Joyce’s innovations emerge from and transform recognizably domestic concerns.

Most valuably, Rooney demonstrates that “misreading” Joyce can be more productive than reverent scholarship. Her final claim—”when it comes to the question of who owns Ulysses, I believe the contemporary reader—perhaps particularly the contemporary novelist—must permit themselves to answer: I do”—is both a manifesto for creative interpretation and a reminder that great literature belongs to its readers, not its critics.