SOURCE: Casey, Paul F. “Thrice: James Stephens's Here Are Ladies.” Eire Ireland 16, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 128–34.

In the following essay, Casey explores Stephens's use of threes in his short stories.

James Stephens is best known for his novels The Crock of Gold and The Charwoman's Daughter, both published in 1912, and to a somewhat lesser extent for his poems. His short stories are usually considered last, if at all, and so receive critical neglect, despite their frequent inclusion in reputable and popular collections of Irish short stories.¹ Explanations are not very convincing for the critical neglect accorded his first collection of short stories Here Are Ladies (1913). One critic detects a “vein of sadism” in these stories and a “tendency to mere ‘cuteness’,”² whereas another praises the “more frivolous” stories but finds that in the more serious ones, Stephen's “perception is weighed down with dullness.”³ In the severely limited criticism on the...