"Leeson park" is a street in south Dublin, just beyond the Grand Canal. Only a short walk from St. Stephen's Green, it would count as central Dublin living today, but in 1904, Gifford notes, it was "on the then-suburban outskirts."

Stephen's imagination that the woman he saw in the window may live in a prosperous southern suburb, and that she is "a lady of letters," suggests that he feels a class-based personal antagonism toward her: she is no kind of companion for a desperately poor, counter-cultural urban intellectual.

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