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.

22:T461,The Insurrection in Dublin was first published in October 1916, barely six months after the Irish Volunteers' Easter Rising took place. The text was never revised so that it has retained the sense of immediacy that makes it one of the classic works of the period. James Stephens is best known as the author of The Crock of Gold and The Demi Gods as well as for his poetry, but as AE wrote in his review of this work: 'he has the most vivid senses of any Irishman now writing. He kept a journal day by day, writing down what he saw with those keen eyes of his. They are the eyes of the poet and storyteller interested a thousand times more in the character of life, in studying behaviour under abnormal circumstances, than in any other aspects of the rising.' These qualities have kept this book recurrently in print. John A. Murphy, Professor of Irish History at University College, Cork, has contributed an Introduction and Afterword, which set the Rising in its historical context, and assess the impact that it had on Ireland at the time and the subsequent events that led up to the foundation of the Irish Free State.23:T44f,Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often referred to as 1984, is a dystopian social science fiction novel by the English novelist George Orwell (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair). It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of persons and behaviours within society. Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within politics and the ways in which they are manipulated. ---------- Also contained in: [Novels (Animal Farm / Burmese Days / Clergyman's Daughter / Coming Up for Air / Keep the Aspidistra Flying / Nineteen Eighty-Four)](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1168045W) [Novels (Animal Farm / Nineteen Eighty-Four)](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1167981W) [Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: Text, Sources, Criticism](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1168095W)24:T4b6,Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate – a marvelous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period – which reveals a hero like no other – one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts. "There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life.... It wa

Books by James Stephens

Readers also follow