James Stephens
Personal Information
Description
James Stephens, born in Dublin, Ireland, was an Irish novelist and poet. His father died when Stephens was two years old, and his mother remarried when he was six years old. He attended school with his adoptive brothers, Thomas and Richard Collins, before graduating as a solicitor's clerk. By the early 1900s Stephens was increasingly inclined to socialism and the Irish language (he spoke and wrote Irish) and by 1912 was a dedicated Irish Republican. He was a close friend of the 1916 leader, Thomas MacDonagh, who was then editor of The Irish Review and deputy headmaster in St Enda's, and later manager of the Irish Theatre. His growing nationalism brought a schism with his adoptive family, but probably won him his job as registrar in the National Gallery of Ireland, where he worked from 1915-25, having previously had an ill-paid job with a firm of solicitors. Stephens produced many retellings of Irish myths which are marked by a rare combination of humour and lyricism. He also wrote several original novels (The Crock of Gold, Etched in Moonlight, Demi-Gods) based loosely on Irish wonder tales. Stephens began his career as a poet under the tutelage of poet and painter Æ (George William Russell). Stephens's first book of poems, Insurrections, was published in 1909. His last book, Kings and the Moon, published in 1938, was also a volume of verse. Stephens's influential account of the 1916 Easter Rising, Insurrection in Dublin, describes the effect of the deaths by execution of his friend Thomas MacDonagh and others as being "like watching blood oozing from under a door". MacDonagh was the first of the leaders who was tried and shot. Stephens later lived between Paris, London and Dublin. During the 1930s he was a friend of James Joyce. During the last decade of his life, Stephens found a new audience through a series of broadcasts on the BBC. Source: [Wikipedia](
Books
English romantic poets
Compiles critical essays on the Romantic Age and the individual works of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.
Deirdre
Traditional Irish fairy tales
A collection of ten traditional tales of Irish heroes, kings, soldiers, magicians, poets, and madmen.
Prentice Hall Literature--Bronze
Grades 7-9
Prentice Hall Literature -- Timeless Voices, Timeless Themes -- Bronze Level
The demi-gods
Patsy Mac Cann spends his days wandering rural Ireland with his daughter Mary Mac Cann and their donkey. They set up camp for the night and are surprised by the appearance of three demi-gods. The demi-gods, strangers to humanity and in need of guidance, decide to follow the Mac Canns. The group begins their adventure on the winding Irish roads, encountering locals—each with their own story to tell. In The Demi-Gods James Stephen takes us on a journey of storytelling, weaving in otherworldly and everyday stories about love, harmony, and materialism. Several of his stories draw inspiration from Irish folklore and mythology. The novel was published in 1914, following the 1912 release of Stephen’s most commercially-successful work, The Crock of Gold.
Irish fairy tales
A collection of ten traditional tales of Irish heroes, kings, soldiers, magicians, poets, and madmen.
Charwoman's Daughter
Sixteen-year-old Mary Makebelieve shares a small room with her mother, a charwoman, in the tenements of early twentieth-century Dublin. While Mrs. Makebelieve is at work cleaning the houses of the wealthy, Mary wanders around the city and its parks absorbed in daydreams. Her encounter with a policeman who appears to signal romantic interest in her is the beginning of Mary’s coming-of-age story, which combines elements of folk- or fairytale with a complex vision of human psychology and the relations between various social groups: mothers and daughters, men and women, the rich and the poor, the young and the old. Written in 1910 and first published the following year as a serial in the short-lived Irish Review (a periodical co-founded by Stephens himself), Mary, Mary was his first published work of prose fiction. According to critic Augustine Martin, it’s the first novel written about Dublin’s slums, the squalor and despair of which Stephens had experienced first-hand in his youth. Martin suggests in his critical study of Stephens that it’s this novel, of all Stephens’ works, that most clearly articulates the driving idea of his literary career: the gap between the hard reality that human beings must endure, and the aspirations of reverie whose realization we seek through imagination.