Nora Barnacle (March 1884 – April 10, 1951) was the muse and wife of author James Joyce.

Nora Barnacle was born in the town of Galway, Ireland, but the day of her birth is uncertain. Depending on the source, it varies between the 21st and the 24th of March 1884. (Her birth certificate, which gives her first name as "Norah," is dated March 21.) Her father Thomas Barnacle, a baker in Connemara, was an illiterate man who was 38 years old when Nora was born. Her mother, Annie Honoria Healy, was 28 and worked as dressmaker.

Between 1886 and 1889, Nora was sent to live with her maternal grandmother, Catherine Mortimer Healy. During these years, she started her studies at a convent, eventually graduating from a national school in 1891. In 1896, Nora completed her schooling and began to work as a porteress and laundress. In the same year, her mother threw her father out for drinking and the couple separated. Nora went to live with her mother and her uncle, Tom Healy, at No.4 Bowling Green, Galway City.

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominently the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. Other major works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters.

Joyce was born to a middle class family in Dublin, where he excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, then at University College Dublin. In his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe, living in Trieste, Paris and Zurich. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe does not extend beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

Louise Colet (August 15, 1810 – March 9, 1876), born Louise Revoil, was a poet born in Aix-en-Provence in France. In her twenties she married Hippolyte Colet, an academic musician, partly in order to escape provincial life and live in Paris.

Upon arrival in Paris, Colet began to submit her work for approval and publication and soon won a two-thousand-franc prize from the Académie française, the first of four prizes won from the Académie. Today critics claim she won the prizes, not by merit, but through the influence of friends. At her salon she associated with many of her contemporaries in the Parisian literary community, such as Victor Hugo.

In 1840 she gave birth to her daughter Henriette, but neither her husband nor her lover, Victor Cousin, would acknowledge paternity. Later she became the paramour of Gustave Flaubert, Alfred de Musset, and Abel Villemain. After her husband died, Colet supported herself and her daughter with her writing.

Her brother was the painter Pierre Révoil. Louise Colet died in Paris.