Having the time of their lives

R.C. Sherriff's The Fortnight in September, part 3

Bognor Regis, 1927 ULLSTEIN BILD/GETTY IMAGES

Welcome to Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society and happy Bloomsday to all those who celebrate. The first ‘official’ Bloomsday was marked in Dublin on 16th June 1954, when a small group of writers and artists gathered to honour the places mentioned in Irish writer James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922). The eighteen episodes of that modernist masterpiece famously trace the fictional Leopold Bloom’s odyssey on foot around Dublin on a single day, 16th June 1904, the date on which James Joyce first ‘walked out’ with his future wife Nora Barnacle. Setting Ulysses on this date (and the character of Molly Bloom herself) was Joyce’s way of paying tribute to Nora as his literary inspiration (though he always claimed that she preferred reading a magazine to any of his books).

The evocation of Dublin is perhaps what is best known about Ulysses, but time is also a central and complex theme of the book, as John Hunt points out. ‘Readers experience not only the events of one ordinary day, but also, through characters’ thoughts, many significant past times – and a few future ones.’¹ The subject of time runs through R.C. Sherriff’s The Fortnight in September like writing on a stick of seaside rock, and we’ll be exploring that in this week’s discussion.

To celebrate Bloomsday, here’s a link to my most popular post, ‘The wedding photos, 1’, which is unpaywalled this week along with Part 2. It’s about how, in 1956, poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes chose to marry in secret on 16th June to honour the Irish writer they both loved. This was featured on The Substack Post last year, thanks to the wonderful

Nick Hornby

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Cambridge Ladies’ Dining Society is a reader-supported publication, and this is a post for paid subscribers and members of our 20th Century Book Club. Next time will be my ‘Substack-centenary’ (= 100th post), with a reading plan for Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers, so look out for that.

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