H. de Vere Stacpoole

Henry de Vere Stacpoole was born at Kingstown, now Dún Laoghaire, in 1863. He trained in medicine in Dublin and London and worked as a doctor, including service at sea. The profession gave him practical knowledge of ships, illness and physical danger, but writing steadily displaced medicine; he published poetry, translations and fiction before finding the subject that defined his career.

The Blue Lagoon appeared in 1908. Its fog, shipboard fire, castaway childhood and enclosed Pacific world made it an international success, and Stacpoole returned to that fictional horizon in later books. He wrote more than fifty volumes across adventure, romance, fantasy and autobiography. The tropical South Seas in those novels were shaped by travel and maritime experience, but also by the conventions and colonial assumptions of Edwardian popular fiction; the result is both historically revealing and, in places, culturally dated.

Stacpoole settled on the Isle of Wight and continued writing into old age. After his wife Margaret died, he served for a time as honorary secretary of the Isle of Wight Society for the Blind. He died in 1951, at eighty-eight. The range of his work has largely vanished from view, while the 1908 novel — repeatedly adapted for film and stage — remains the book attached to his name.