[In the following excerpt, McFate analyzes Stephens's oeuvre.]

The Charwoman's Daughter is a remarkably harmonious blend of disparate styles and genres. It ranges in tone from whimsy to objectivity, from sentimentality to “philosophizing,” and in approach from passages reminiscent of the nineteenth-century novelist to those peculiar to Stephens alone. At various times and in varying degrees it is a fairy tale about two characters called the Makebelieves, a realistic look at life in the Dublin slums, and a psychological analysis of the relationship between a widowed mother and her daughter.

The Charwoman's Daughter begins in the style of the Märchen, then becomes realistic and later aphoristic. In The Crock of Gold Stephens works these styles more closely together so that the account of Caitilin Ni Murrachu's union with Angus Óg is at once a fairy tale, a love story, and an object lesson.

This book is deliberately Irish in characterization, setting, and theme. … Angus Óg is not one of the Gaelic warriors such as Finn or Cúchulinn; rather he is the god of poetry, of love, of divine imagination. His setting is the forest, his followers are those who seek inspiration not revenge. His combat with Pan is philosophical in nature, his victory spiritual despite the physicality represented in Caitilin's naked body. Angus Óg's victory would not be what Arthur Griffith and his political compatriots envisioned; it comes closer to the belief of AE, Yeats, and others in old gods who inspire and teach the Irish people. Stephens will deal with the bloody battles of the Irish saga in later novels; here he celebrates the triumph of charity and creativity.

The gaiety, the music, and the dance of joy envisioned by the Philosopher at the beginning of the book form the background for the ending. Moreover, the dancer's circular pattern, from countryside to city to a return to the home of the gods, is both descriptive of the plot and, Stephens hopes, prophetic of Ireland's future. The Crock of Gold is concerned with a descent into corrupt civilization and a return to beneficial nature. Ireland in the form of Caitilin, must make her way from Pan to Angus, from foreign to Gaelic gods, from base materialism to divine spirituality.

The Crock of Gold is, among other things, a prophecy and as such it is not surprising that Stephens, in writing the book, paid reverence to William Blake.

Stephens' admiration of Blake took the form of adaption of Blake's style, characters, and beliefs. In The Crock of Gold there are three themes which Stephens found in Blake's writings and made his own: the enmity between men and women, the happy innocence of childhood, and the need to embrace life's joys and its responsibilities.

Although Irish Fairy Tales is a departure in setting and characterization from the earlier fiction of Stephens, there are certain thematic similarities to be found. Once again fantasy (magical dwellings, shape-changing, disguised gods) is combined with reality (conflicting emotions of lovers, boasting conversations between rivals, devotion to children). It is appropriate that the stories of Fionn dominate the collection because he embraced both worlds. Fionn was a hero, a giant, a descendant of the gods; but he was also, like Stephens, a father, a husband, and a man who loved “the music of what happens.”

Stephens saw in Deirdre many of the traits of the modern heroine. In [Deirdre,] his version of the ancient tale, Deirdre joins the line of lonely young women who rebel against their parents. She is the most rebellious of the four, running away from her guardian and refusing to marry a king. Like Caitilin Ni Murrachu, she is a beautiful woman raised in the sunshine and peace of the Irish countryside. Like Mary Makebelieve who talks to ducklings, Deirdre converses with birds in their nests. When she puts her arms around “the shaggy mare and her dear, shy foaleen,” one remembers Mary Mac Cann hugging her donkey. Deirdre's maternal instinct is aroused when she meets Naoise, for she knows that she can be both mother and wife to him.

Deirdre's guardian, Lavarcham, has a face of “ivory and jet,” an abbreviated description recalling Mrs. Makebelieve and the Thin Woman. All three women hold strong opinions on domestic matters and are able counselors on the subject of the warfare between men and women. The male characters in the first four novels are also related. The lodger, the demi-god Art, and Naoise are boyish, handsome, and heroic. The villainous Policeman and Conachúr are spiders, waiting to catch Mary and Deirdre in their webs.

His insertions of “modernity” in Deirdre and Irish Fairy Tales—the humanizing of the saga figures by explanations of their emotions, the addition of color and humor to the darker tales of treachery and murder, and the creation of dialogue which is comprehensible to the modern reader—do not prevent Stephens from maintaining the integrity of the legends by adhering to their essential plot and outlines. …

In addition to being a collection of delightful short tales, Here Are Ladies is an interesting document because it contains works which are among the first examples of the modern Irish short story. Stephens' characters are clerks and employers, spinster landladies and frustrated housewives, nervous bachelors and smug husbands; the urban counterparts of the priests and peasants found in George Moore's The Untiled Field. Their stories are told in a lean, hard style: unnecessary details such as names, specific dates, and places are eliminated; little time is spent on distinguishing characteristics or on dialogue; the narrator gives the reader merely a brief look at a situation. Obvious literary ancestors are Moore, Chekhov, and Galsworthy, but in none of these writers do we find the variety of humor which pervades most of the stories. …

Of the short stories published in Here Are Ladies, “A Glass of Beer,” “The Horses,” and “The Blind Man” link most closely with the works of Stephens included in Etched in Moonlight. The emotions which were barely kept in control in the first book are now on a rampage; avarice, envy, despair, shame, jealousy, malice, guilt, anger consume the characters. Husband and wife clash or endure a grinding poverty with no release short of death.

[There] are no happy endings in these stories. The mood ranges from irritability to desperation. Stephens' whimsy is gone; his humor is sardonic; there is no light touch to relieve the tension. The characters find no comfort in their settings. A husband seeks a different life and finds only death; a woman and her children cannot escape the horror of starvation; a man cannot avoid meeting a reminder of his past; another is forced by his obsessive thoughts to relive the past; in several works the indifference, the inhumanity of man toward his fellowman brings down the helpless victim. In the streets, in offices, in homes, in the countryside, there is no escape.

The stories in Etched in Moonlight provide evidence of Stephens' efforts to polish his short fiction: these are precisely cut, well-mounted gems. … The characters in Stephens' short stories are often anonymous; it is their deeds, their internal conflicts, or the events crushing them which the reader remembers. When this method works, in “Hunger” for example, where the anonymity is a counterpoint to a tale of immense human suffering, it produces a memorable short story. Too often, however, the story cannot survive such impersonal treatment and is quickly forgotten.

Stephens' works reveal a personality like that of Ireland: brooding, highly comic, and bold. His novels and poems show us the gaiety and the loneliness of the Irish people: their estrangement from the land which was once theirs and their desire to return to an earlier, pastoral period; their animosities and suspicions; their flights of fantasy; and their love of words. His works are filled with the sunshine and thunder, lush vegetation and dirty slums, green trees and bloody combats of Ireland.

Although he had an ability to marry the opposites, including those of time and space, in one area he set up no contrasts. His best writing concentrates solely on Ireland. Insurrections and The Charwoman's Daughter provide affectionate or grimly accurate pictures of Dublin; The Crock of Gold and The Demi-Gods expand the setting to include the Irish countryside; Deirdre, Irish Fairy Tales, Reincarnations, and In the Land of Youth expand the time frame to include vivid, bold recreations of Ireland's past. Whatever the subject, it is an Irishman who is telling the story.

Stephens' love is for every creature and he displays this affection time and time again. All of his heroines are motivated by love in its manifold forms—maternal, charitable, sexual, marital. The secret of his successful works is that in them he embodies love; the later, more arid works only talk about it. In his last poems he no longer seeks Love the Magician; he is himself magician, dealing in mystical symbols, esoteric rites, mysterious rituals. Poetry is no longer a manifestation of love; it comes from the poet's Will. The vitality one senses in the clash of emotions in Insurrections, The Demi-Gods, and Deirdre has vanished; whatever energy is left comes from idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization.

In his best works he balances groups of two, three, or four characters in order to illustrate certain themes: the Contraries, sexual jealousy, and the divided self. These matters are also encompassed by the theme of love because fulfillment can only come through union.

His works are all variations on this theme. Love is the motivation for patriotic essays and adaptations of Gaelic legends; it is the subject of stories concerning husbands and wives, parents and children, man and nature's creations. What shines through the prescriptions for a better world, the psychological analyses, the tales of the fantastic, the romantic, the grotesque, and the realistic is his first, his final, his over-arching theme—love. Stephens' works are his variations on this theme, his valentines to the world.