Mary, Mary

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. Perfect for readers who love lyrical Irish literature and tender coming-of-age stories, this enchanting novel weaves together the harsh realities of Dublin tenement life with the magical world of daydreams and first love. Stephens masterfully captures the delicate transition from childhood to womanhood through Mary's eyes, creating a timeless tale that resonates with anyone who has ever dared to dream beyond their circumstances. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)