Deirde

James Stephens ( February 9, 1880–  December 26 1950.) was an Irish novelist and poet. Stephens father died when Stephens was two years old, and when he was six years old, his mother remarried, and Stephens was committed to the Meath Protestant Industrial School for Boys after he was found begging on the streets. Most of his childhood was spent at the school.

By the early 1900s Stephens, a socialist, was a dedicated Irish nationalist. He produced, in book form, many retellings of Irish myths and Deirdre is one of them, a book often signaled out for praise. He also wrote several original novels, all of them  based loosely on Irish wonder tales.

Deirdre is the story of a young girl raised in isolation to become the Ulster King's wife. She instead falls in love with a young man and they elope to Scotland. Lured back to Ireland many years later, she is faced with treachery and eternal sorrow.

Stephens's two novellas, Deirdre (1923) and In the Land of Youth (1924), are drawn from the Ulster cycle of Irish mythology. They were intended to be part of a five-volume work, an Irish Epic, but Stephens abandoned the idea, discouraged by critical reaction