The misses Flynn had been pupils of the famous Dublin composer Michael Balfe (so Joyce claimed) and, as their great-nephew put it, 'trilled and warbled in a Dublin church up to the age of seventy'. This was in the ancient Franciscan church on the south quays popularly known as Adam and Eve's, the name of which is evoked in the opening passage of Finnegans Wake...

   The youngest sister Ellen Mary (Flynn family), married Matthew Callanan, sometime secretary of the Irish Farmers Club in Upper Sackville Street, by whom she had a daughter Mary Ellen born about 1871. 

    An elder sister Julia Clare (Flynn family), born about 1829. married a man named Martin Lyons, then a commercial traveler, who later set up as a paper and hide merchant and stationer, with a printing works largely for legal materials at 6 Ormond Quay and a yard for the hides at 16 Usher court. 

    In about 1856 another of the sisters, Margaret Teresa Flynn - then about 23 years old - married in her turn a John Murray who introduced into this long line of Dubliners a new and rural strain... In the late 1850s and early 1860s John Murray and his wife were running their own Dublin tea and wine merchant's premises - in other words a pub called The Eagle House - in Roundtown (now Terenure), the same district into which their grandson (James Joyce) would  be born. The family situation in The Eagle House - a father and mother with a beautiful daughter and two quarrelling sons - is the basic situation in Finnegans Wake.

    After the early deaths of their husbands and the decline of their brother Patrick, the sisters (including those who were unmarried and also their aunts) moved back south of the Liffey at the beginning of 1882, leasing upper stories of an eighteenth-century house overlooking the Liffey quays at 15 Ushers Island, in the same area where the late Mr. Lyons had run his hide business. Here in the large gracious rooms, the sisters continued to advertise their music classes still under the style of the Misses Flynn. Here they gave the annual Christmastime parties for their pupils and musical friends which Joyce's parents attended and which inspired the setting of his story 'The Dead'.

Biography by Peter Costello