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.