Joyce and feminism? Very strange bedfellows. Change either term to catch the full effect: Woolf and feminism; Joyce and Ireland. Now these couples were meant to share beds. But Joyce and feminism? What possibly have these two to say to one another? Can the conjunction be anything more than the now obligatory ('politically correct'?) supplementing of every analytical survey of the work of any writer with a critique supplied by 'feminism'? After all, on most of the several thousand websites currently citing 'James Joyce', readymade 'feminist' hatchet jobs wait to be read. Caveat lector. Didn't Joyce himself say 'I hate intellectual women'? Did he not, if we believe his close friend Frank Budgen, 'talk bitterly about women . . . [about] woman's invasiveness and in general her perpetual urge to usurp all the functions of the male - all save that one which is biologically pre-empted, and even on that [to] cast jealous threatening eyes'? Where in his work is there a single example of an independent, successful, happily fulfilled woman character? Beyond this, isn't the writing elitist, being, as it is, notoriously and renownedly 'difficult', and isn't such 'difficulty' just another male modernist writer's attempt to elevate his work to the realm of art, above the domain of the popular and populist culture of the newly educated masses or, more pointedly, to 'ward off the onslaughts of women [writers]' who over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were entering the profession of literature in ever-increasing - and increasingly successful - numbers?