this point, perhaps, that Stacpoole began to
view literary success only in terms of sales figures and numbers of
editions.

A strange tale of reincarnation, cross dressing, and uxoricide,
Stacpoole's third novel, Death, the Knight, and the Lady (1897),
purports to be the deathbed confession of Beatrice Sinclair, who is
both a reincarnated murderer (male) and a descendant of the murder
victim (female). She falls in love with Gerald Wilder, a man disguised
as a woman, who is both a reincarnated murder victim (female) and the
descendant of the murderer (male). Despite its originality, the novel
was killed by "Public Indifference" (Stacpoole's term), which also
killed The Rapin (1899), a novel about an art student in Paris.

Stacpoole spent the summer of 1898 in Sommerset, where he took over the
medical practice of an ailing country doctor. So peaceful were his days
in this pastoral setting that he had time to write The Doctor (1899), a
novel about an old-fashioned physician practicing medicine in rural
England. "It is the best book I have written," Stacpoole declared more
than forty years later. He could also say, in retrospect, that the
book's weak sales were a disguised blessing, "for I hadn't ballast on
board in those days to stand up to the gale of success, which means
incidentally money." He would be spared the gale of success for nine
more years, during which he published seven books, including a
collection of children's stories and two collaborative novels with his
friend William Alexander Bryce.

In 1907, two events occurred that altered the course of Stacpoole's
life: he wrote The Blue Lagoon and he married Margaret Robson. Unable
to sleep one night, he found himself thinking about and envying the
caveman, who in his primitiveness was able to marvel at such
commonplace phenomena as sunsets and thunderstorms. Civilized,
technological man had unveiled these mysteries with his telescopes and
weather balloons, so that they were no longer "nameless wonders" to be
feared and contemplated. As a doctor, Stacpoole had witnessed countless
births and deaths, and these events no longer seemed miraculous to him.
He conceived the idea of two children growing up alone on an island and
experiencing storms, death, and birth in almost complete ignorance and
innocence. The next morning, he started writing The Blue Lagoon. The
exercise was therapeutic because he was able to experience the wonders
of life and death vicariously thr