“It Wouldn’t Be Her Own”: Norah Hoult’s “Miss Jocelyn” as a Response to James Joyce’s “Eveline”

This article examines Norah Hoult’s 1929 short story “Miss Jocelyn,” from her short story collection Poor Women!, as an intertextual response to James Joyce’s representation of single women in the short story “Eveline” included in his landmark 1914 collection Dubliners. Drawing on Katherine Fama and Jorie Lagerwey’s work on singlehood, I suggest that Hoult challenges the dichotomy of “married” versus “premarried” that Joyce critiques in “Eveline”. At the same time, Hoult’s portrait of Miss Jocelyn powerfully engages the material and social factors that so often condition single women’s lives. She considers not only Miss Joceyln’s awareness and loss of her former independence, but also the ways that ageism compromises her options and agency. While both stories examine the disempowerment of women, “Miss Joceyln” highlights the loss of agency, the financial dependency, and the societal dismissal to which celibate older women were often subject in early twentieth-century Ireland and Britain, thus treating celibacy as a “third space”—an option not proffered in Joyce’s work.