" One night,
he escaped through an adjacent girls' school and returned to Kingstown,
only to be betrayed by his family and dragged back to school by his
eldest sister.

When his family moved to London, he was taken out of Portarlington and
enrolled at Malvern College, a progressive school with refined students
and plenty of air and sunshine. Stacpoole thoroughly enjoyed his new
surroundings, which he associated with the description of Malvern Hills
in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1857): "Keepers of Piers
Plowman's visions / Through the sunshine and the snow." This
environment encouraged his interest in literature and writing.

The idyll ended, however, when Stacpoole began his medical training. At
his mother's prodding, he entered the medical school at St. George's
Hospital. Twice a day, he had to traverse a park frequented by
perambulating nursemaids, and he became romantically involved with one
of them. When his mother discovered their affair, she insisted that he
transfer to University College, and he complied.

More interested in literature than corpses, Stacpoole began to neglect
his studies and miss classes, especially the required dissections.
Finally, the dean of the medical school confronted him, and their
argument drove Stacpoole to St. Mary's Hospital, where he completed his
medical training and qualified L. S. A. in 1891. At some point after
this date, Stacpoole made several sea voyages into the tropics (at
least once as a doctor aboard a cable-mending ship), collecting
information for future stories.

Stacpoole's literary career, which he once described as being "more
like a Malay fishing prahu than an honest-to-God English literary
vessel," began inauspiciously with the publication of The Intended
(1894), a tragic novel about two look-alikes, one rich, the other poor,
who switch places on a whim. Bewildered by the novel's lack of success,
Stacpoole consulted his friendly muse, Pearl Craigie, alias John Oliver
Hobbes, who suggested a comic rather than tragic treatment. Years
later, Stacpoole retold the story in The Man Who Lost Himself (1918), a
commercially successful comic novel about a down-and-out American who
impersonates his wealthy look-alike in England.

Set in France during the Franco-Prussian War, Stacpoole's second novel,
Pierrot (1896), recounts a French boy's eerie relationship with a
patricidal doppelganger. Like its predecessor, it was a commercial
failure, and it was at