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Henry de Vere Stacpoole (1863–1951) was born 9 April 1863 at Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire), Co. Dublin, the youngest child and only son of Rev. William Church Stacpoole, clergyman and director of Kingstown school, and his wife, Charlotte Augusta (née Mountjoy). Rev. William Stacpoole died in 1870 and the children were raised by their mother, spending some time in the south of France in an attempt to improve Henry's chronic bronchitis.

He was educated at Portarlington Boarding School in Ireland, which was not a happy experience—in the autobiographical Men and Mice he wrote about being abused physically and mentally by his companions. He later enrolled at Malvern College in Worcestershire, a progressive school that finally met his expectations, then studied medicine at St George's and St Mary's hospitals and became a doctor in 1891. He worked for the next few years as a ship's doctor.

Stacpoole simultaneously pursued a literary career, and his first published work was a poem published in Belgravia. He produced several novels during the 1890s (The Intended, 1894; Pierrot, 1896; Death, the Knight and the Lady, 1897; The Rapin, 1899; The Doctor, 1899), none of which succeeded commercially, and he continued to earn his living as a doctor, based in a small practice in Somerset, England.

By the early 1900s, Stacpoole had become a permanent professional writer; in an interview, he claimed that he wrote 2000 words a day and that his main sources of inspiration were Edgar Allan Poe, Victor Hugo, Eugène Sue, and Robert Louis Stevenson. His literary fortunes gradually improved: he attracted favourable attention with the romantic comedy Fanny Lambert (1905), and achieved his first real financial success with The Crimson Azaleas (1907), a novel set in Japan, followed by The Blue Lagoon (1908), a highly popular tale concerning the adventures of two children shipwrecked on a Pacific island. In 1907 he married Margaret Ann, a writer, the daughter of William Robson of Tynemouth.