Bloomsday Bloomsday Bloomsday is a commemoration and celebration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce, observed annually in Dublin and elsewhere on 16 June, the day his novel "Ulysses" takes place in 1904, the date of his first outing with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle, and named after its protagonist Leopold Bloom. The English compound word "Bloomsday" is usually used in Irish as well, though some publications call it . The first mention of such a celebration is to be found in a letter by Joyce to Miss Weaver of 27 June 1924, which refers to "a group of people who
Molly Bloom is hard to distinguish between a chunk of one of Nora's letters and a chunk of Molly's final monologue". Some research also points to another possible model for Molly in Amalia Popper, one of Joyce's students to whom he taught English while living in Trieste. Amalia Popper was the daughter of a Jewish businessman named Leopoldo Popper, who had worked for a European freight forwarding company (Adolf Blum & Popper) founded in 1875 in its headquarters in Hamburg by Adolf Blum, after whom Leopold Bloom was named. In the (now published) manuscript "Giacomo Joyce", are images and themes Joyce used