The programme, Arena: James Joyce’s ULYSSES, will air tomorrow night (Wednesday 7 September) on BBC 2 at 9pm, and promises to reveal the ‘tawdry, shocking, poetic, uplifting and gloriously kaleidoscopic humanity of Joyce’s masterpiece’.

Dr Hutton, from the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, will discuss the women who supported James Joyce and the publication of his landmark novel.

They include Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, a lesbian couple who risked being sent to jail for printing obscene material in America; Sylvia Beach, the American in Paris, who published the first edition from her bookshop Shakespeare and Co; Harriet Shaw Weaver, the English heiress who gave Joyce over one million pounds; and Nora Barnacle, Joyce’s wife, muse and the model for his character Molly Bloom.

Dr Hutton is the curator of an exhibition at the Harry Ranson Center, in Texas, which is based on these women.

Other contributors to the upcoming programme include the Indian-born British-American novelist, Salman Rushdie.

The documentary will also be available on BBC iPlayer shortly after broadcast: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001bvp2

ENDS