The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. By Kevin Birmingham.Penguin Press; 417 pages; $29.95. Head of Zeus; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IN 1922 a demure, middle-aged woman called Harriet Weaver visited several London bookshops with a bulky volume wrapped in paper under her arm. In time government officials would declare the book, entitled “Ulysses” and written by a little-known Irish author, James Joyce, to be “unreadable, unquotable and unreviewable”. British war censors became convinced that it was written in spy code. It was confiscated and burned on both sides of the Atlantic. Miss Weaver, a rich heiress who baffled her family by publishing and defending Joyce, was put under police surveillance. But as copies of the book burned, she printed more.

Few novels are as notorious as “Ulysses”. It is now considered one of the finest works of modernist fiction of the 20th century. Around 300 books of criticism, 50 written in the past ten years alone, have puzzled over it. But when “Ulysses” came out in 1922 it caused uproar. For a decade and a half—over twice the length of time it took Joyce to write the book—it was banned in America and Britain.

“The Most Dangerous Book”, by Kevin Birmingham, a literary historian at Harvard University, tells the story of how “Ulysses” was published in instalments in small literary magazines and then in private, limited print runs by dedicated patrons (most of them women). Mr Birmingham describes the multiple court cases, the legal wrangles and the extraordinary lengths men and women went to in order to smuggle it into Britain and America. In doing so, he offers a refreshing take on a tricky, exhilarating work.

“Ulysses” describes a day in the life of two men, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, in Dublin in 1904. With no quotation marks or conventional structure it can be a tough read. Chapters switch between different styles, while hundreds of characters appear in its pages. The final chapter is written in unbroken stream-of-consciousness. Joyce’s characters swear freely, while he captures their every moment, no matter how base. Even other literary figures were shocked by it. D.H. Lawrence, whose own book, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”, would go on to be prosecuted under obscenity laws, felt the final chapter was “the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written”. Virginia Woolf, who wrote a novel partly inspired by the one-day narrative of “Ulysses”, dismissed it as “the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are”.

Even as “Ulysses” was breaking the rules, those rules were being tightened. Laws banning obscene books appeared in the mid-19th century, in response to rising literacy rates and urbanisation. A growing appetite for protecting public morality ensured that these laws were enforced. In 1912 the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice prompted the police to arrest 76 people in America, rising to 184 by 1920, a record year for detentions. Joyce’s book was a perfect target. Even before it was published it was declared obscene; copies of the Little Review, a Chicago-based literary magazine which published extracts, were apparently torn apart by fallen women employed in reform programmes with the Salvation Army.

Mr Birmingham’s descriptions of the fight between these moral crusaders and the people defending Joyce’s work are thrilling. Joyce came under pressure to finish the book, in part because of the looming threat of legal action against it. With the eye of a novelist Mr Birmingham enlivens his story with details about these forgotten characters: how the judge who ultimately overturned the ban in America wore a tie when playing tennis and how the British lawyer who declared that the novel was “filthy, and filthy books are not allowed to be imported into this country” disliked cars, even as late as the 1950s.

In evoking the process of publishing “Ulysses”, Mr Birmingham also offers an astute portrait of the book’s creator. Joyce’s failing eyesight—the likely result of syphilis caught as a young man—and his various operations to improve it are described in detail. If Mr Birmingham occasionally slips into academic jargon, at other moments he almost seems swept up in his own Joycean prose. Few books about publishing manage to be this gripping. Like the novel which it takes as its subject, it deserves to be read.