Lilo M Stephens Foreword (1 results)
My Uncle John: Edward Stephens's Life of J.M. Synge
Edward M. Stephens; Andrew Carpente; Lilo M. Stephens (foreword)
- Hardcover
- First Edition
Seller: killarneybooks, Inagh, CLARE, Irelandkillarneybooks
Contact seller5-star sellerCondition: Used - Very good
£ 12.75
£ 28.76 shippingShips from Ireland to U.S.A.Quantity: 1 available
Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. Cloth hardcover, xviii + 222pp + 8 pages of glossy b&w photos, NOT ex-library. Clean and bright contents, untanned, with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps, firmly bound. Signs of gentle handling wear. In a lightly worn, bright, untorn an…d unclipped dust jacket. -- This posthumously published biography of the playwright John Millington Synge (1871-1909) was composed over many years by his nephew Edward Millington Stephens (1888-1955), a Dublin solicitor who devoted much of his life to preserving and documenting his uncle's memory. Stephens began the project partly as a corrective to what the family perceived as the inaccuracies of W.B. Yeats's and other early accounts of Synge's life. Stephens died in 1955 with the manuscript unfinished, and the literary scholar Andrew Carpenter edited and prepared the text for publication, working with the family's cooperation nearly two decades later. Carpenter's editorial work involved distilling the vast, multi-volume original draft into this cohesive single-volume biography. The book draws on intimate family knowledge and private papers to reconstruct Synge's life from his Dublin Protestant upbringing through his years of wandering in Paris and on the Aran Islands to his emergence as one of the defining voices of the Irish Literary Revival. As a nephew writing from within the family circle, Stephens offers a perspective unavailable to outside biographers, interweaving his own childhood recollections of "Uncle John" with a scholarly investigation into the domestic, social and religious milieu of the Anglo-Irish Synge household and the tensions between that background and the playwright's radical artistic choices. The account traces Synge's path to the Abbey Theatre, which he co-founded with W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and the creation of works including Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World, whose 1907 premiere provoked riots in Dublin. The familial vantage point gives the work its distinctive character and its limitations: Stephens writes with affection and proprietary knowledge but also with the reticence of a family member conscious of reputation. For scholars of Synge, the Irish Literary Revival and the cultural politics of early 20th-century Ireland, the biography remains a primary source of biographical detail unavailable elsewhere, particularly regarding the playwright's early health struggles and his private relationship with Molly Allgood.
