SOURCE: Review of Deirdre, by James Stephens. Times Literary Supplement: TLS (20 September 1923): 618.

In the following review of Deirdre, the critic asserts that Stephens writes in a style that is “whimsical, lyrical, [and bubbling.”]

It would seem inevitable that every Irish poet in the time of his strength should relate the greatest of the “Three Sorrows of Storytelling” and to that list of names, which reaches from Sir Samuel Ferguson to J. M. Synge, another name may now be added. Mr. James Stephens, in Deirdre, has chosen to write in prose and in a manner that is, needless to say, as far from the embattled sentences of Standish O'Grady as from the dialect that Lady Gregory found in no green field: a manner that has developed through his Irish Fairy Tales, still whimsical, lyrical, bubbling with playful anachronism that is more sophisticated than that of an Elizabethan poet and...