SOURCE: “Another Convention.” Times Literary Supplement (22 March 1928): 210.

In the following review of Etched in Moonlight, the critic notes the use of the moral in Stephens's fiction.

[Etched in Moonlight] is a haunted house among the many mansions of contemporary fiction. Here is, indeed, psychological discrimination enough to compare with the usual mode of portraying what is passing, but Mr. Stephens essays a remoter region of personal complexities than is usual. One would not lightly decide whether his characters were in the flesh or in the spirit. He pursues invisibles and imponderables with a passionate insistency, and is a willing watcher of the conventions of the world of dreams, refusing to assume that our waking logic and habit are absolutely more valuable than the seeming incoherency of that other universe. Enlightened with this independence of view, he stands out as a strangely luminous and complete recorder of dream scenes...