SOURCE: Review of Deirdre, by James Stephens. New Statesman 21, no. 545 (22 September 1922): 682.

In the following review of Deirdre, the commentator describes Stephens's prose manner as straight forward and nearly abstract in its objective descriptions.

This new book by Mr. James Stephens [Deirdre] has been announced as “a dramatic story of youth and love, of treachery and doom, and of mighty fighting.” It is possible to read it as such and to have little need for remembering that the romance is racial, a slowly-fashioned idea of loveliness and of the pity of love; or that Gaelic poets for centuries, though they have spoken of Helen of Troy with a show of learning, have done so but to rank that woman of the burning town with their own Deirdre of the Sorrows. Certainly, in this story of Mr. Stephens there is no paraphernalia of an heroic age, and the spears or...