Mary, Mary

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.

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