b. April 1863, Kingstown [now Dun Laoghaire]; son of Rev. William Church Stacpoole and Charlotte Augusta [née Mountjoy]; ed. Portarlington, then Malvern College before studying medicine at St. George’s and St. Mary’s Hospital, London; initially practiced medicine as a ship’s doctor; his early fiction incls. The Intended (1894); The Doctor (1895); he turned professional writer after the success of The Blue Lagoon (1908) - a ‘romance’ concerning Dicky and Emmeline, cousins and castaways, who begin as children and enter adolescence together; often filmed and prone to soft-porn treatment on the screen; there followed The Garden of God (1923) and The Gates of Morning (1925) in the Blue Lagoon trilogy;

he largely devoted himself to the production of novels set in far-flung places begun in earnest with The Crimson Azaleas (1907); wrote numerous other novels cashing in on the taste for exotic lands incl. The Pools of Silence (1915), set in the Congo, The Beach of Dreams (1919), and The Girl on the Golden Reef (1929); Mice and Men (1942) and More Mice and Men (1944) are autobiographical; he also wrote a life of Francoise Villon (1916) and issued Poems and Ballads (1910) and The North Sea and Other Poems (1915); m. Margaret Robson (d.1934), and afterwards m. her sister Florence, in 1938; lived in Essex before settling at Cliff Dene, Bonchurch, Isle of Wight in the 1920s; bur. St. Boniface Church, Bonchurch; d. 12 April 1951. IF PI DIW DIB OCEL SUTH APPL OCIL

• The Intended (London: John Lane 1894).
• The Doctor (London: John Lane 1895).
• Pierrot! (London: John Lane 1896).
• Monsieur de Rochfort (London: G. Newness 1900).
• The Crimson Azaleas (Philadelphia: Lippincott 1907), and Do. [rep. edn.] (London: Allen 1935), 254pp.
• The Blue Lagoon: A Romance (New York: Duffield; London: Crown 1908), and Do. [new edn.] (1910), ill. [numerous de luxe & pop. edns. [see details].
• Patsy (London: Fisher Unwin 1908), 362pp.
• with W. A. Bryce, The Meddler: A Novel of Sorts (London: Alston Rivers 1909), [rep.]. (viii), 308pp.
• Garryowen: The Romance of a Racehorse (NY: Duffield 1909; London: Fisher Unwin 1910).
• The Drums of War (London: John Murray 1910).
• The Shop of Coral (London: Hutchinson 1911).
• The Street of the Flute Player (London: Hutchinson 1912).
• The Children of the Sea (London: Hutchinson 1913).
• England Expects (London: Curwen 1914).
• The New Optimist (London & NY: John Lane 1914).
• Father O’Flynn (London: Hutchinson 1914), 245pp.
• The Pearl Fishers (London & NY: John Lane 1915).
• Pools of Silence (London: T. Fisher Unwin 1915).
• The Reef of Red Stars (London: Hutchinson 1916).
• The Good Trail: A Romance of the South Seas (London & NY: John Lane 1916).
• Journal d’un Officier Prussian (Paris: Bloud & Gay 1916).
• The Beach of Dreams: A Story of the True World (London: Hutchinson 1919), 316pp.
• Sea Plunder (London & NY: John Lane 1917).

• Francoise Villon (London: Hutchinson 1913), and Do., as Francis Villon (NY: Putnam 1917).
• The Man who Lost Himself (London & NY: John Lane 1918).
• The Beach of Dreams (London & NY: John Lane 1919).
• The House of Crimson Shadows (London: Hutchinson 1920).
• The Man Who Found Himself (London & NY: John Lane 1920).
• Sappho (London: Hutchinson 1922).
• Vanderdecken (NY: R. M. McBride 1922).
• Men, Women and Beasts (London: Hutchinson 1922).
• The Garden of God (NY: Dodd, Mead 1923).
• The Golden Ballast (London: Hutchinson; NY: Jacobson 1924).
• The Gates of Morning (London: Hutchins 1925).
• In a Bonchurch Garden (London: Hutchinson 1927).
• Goblin Market (London: Cassell 1927).
• The Mystery of Uncle Ballard (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran 1928).
• Eileen of the Trees (Carden City: NY: Doran 1929).
• The Girl of the Golden Reef (London: Hutchinson 1929).
• Pacific Gold (NY: Sears 1931).
• Love on the Adriatic (London: Ernest Benn 1932), 159pp.
• The Naked Soul (London: William Collins 1933).
• The Vengeance of Myheer Van Lok (London: Hutchinson 1934).
• The Longshore Girl (London: Hutchinson 1935).
• Stories of East and West: Tales of Men and Women (London: Hutchinson 1926), 284pp., and Do. [6 thousandth] ([1928]), 284pp..
• Vanderdeken: The Story of A Man (London: Hutchinson 1923), 287pp.

  Note: The above list has been compiled with the aid of COPAC - online. See some variant listings Wikipedia - online.

• Mice and Men (London: Hutchinson 1942) and More Mice and Men (London: Hutchinson 1944).

• Poems and Ballads (1910).
• The North Sea and Other Poems (London: Hutchinson 1915).
• The Book of Francis Villon (Boston: Internat. Pocket Library 1931).

• E. A. Malone, ‘H. de Vere Stacpoole’, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 153: Late-Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists, First Series, edited by G. M. Johnson, Detroit: Gale, 1995, pp. 278-287.
• R. F. Hardin, ‘The Man Who Wrote The Blue Lagoon: Stacpoole’s Pastoral Cente’, in English Literature in Transition (1880-1920), vol. 39, no. 2, 1996, pp. 205-0.
• C. Deméocq, ‘Henry de Vere Stacpoole aux Kerguelen’, in Carnets de l'Exotisme, vol. 17-18, 1996, pp. 151-52.

See ‘Henry de Vere Stacpoole’ - online;

[Button] was a Celt, and all the salt seas that had flowed between him and Connaught these forty years and more had not washed the Celtic element from his blood, nor the belief in fairies from his soul. The Celtic nature is a fast dye, and Mr. Button’s nature was such that though he had been shanghaied by Larry Marr in ’Frisco, though he had got drunk in most ports of the world, though he had sailed with Yankee captains and had been man-handled by Yankee mates, he still carried his fairies with him – they, and a very large stock of original innocence. [2]

[...]

Yet Paddy, in his left-handed way, was as hard a worker as any man on board ship; and as for melancholy, he was the life and soul of the fo’cs’le. Yet there they were, the laziness and melancholy, only waiting to be tapped. [73] [Button:] ‘don’t be talkin,’ or its the Cluricaunes will be after us ... Little men no bigger than your thumb who make the brogues for the Good People’ [94]; [On the eating of the seed potatoes from the brig:] Dick felt the absolute thriftlessness of this proceeding. Emmeline did not ... though she could have told you the colour of all the birds in the island ... Dick came of the people who make sewing machines and typewriters. Mr. Button came of a people notable for ballads and tender hearts, and potheen. That was the main difference. [155]

The island, the lagoon, and the reef were the three volumes of a great picture book, as they were for Emmeline, though in a different manner. The colour and the beauty of it all fed some mysterious want in her soul. Her life was a long reverie, a beautiful vision – troubled with shadows. Across all the blue and coloured spaces, she could still see as in a glass dimly the Northumberland, smoking against the wild background of fog ... and nearer, the tragic form on the reef that still haunted terribly her dreams. ... [but] she kept ... the secret of her feelings about these things [182]

‘I think that we civilised folk put on a lot of airs and waste a lot of pity on savages ... who is happier than a naked savage in a warm climate? Oh, he’s happy enough, and he’s not always holding a corroboree. He’s a good deal of a gentleman; he has perfect health; he lives the life that a man was born to live face to face with Nature. He doesn’t see the sun through an office window or the moon through the smoke of factory chimneys ... The whites have driven him out.’

[Lestrange:] ‘Suppose they were like that, would it not be a cruelty to bring them to what we call civilisation? [324].

(For longer extracts, see Ricorso Library, “Authors”, infra; see also full-text digital version in RICORSO Library, “Irish Classics”, via index, or direct). Comment: de Stacpoole view the Irish character as expressed in Paddy Button as a combination of profound laziness mixed with a profound melancholy.