The Blue Lagoon: A Romance

This annotated edition of *The Blue Lagoon: A Romance* includes:

• Original reading notes before each chapter
• Explanatory notes and commentary
• A detailed biography of H. de Vere Stacpoole
• Historical, literary, and cultural context
• An expanded reading guide
• Critical essays on the novel’s major themes and style
• Reading pathways, discussion questions, and writing prompts
• A glossary of useful historical, nautical, and period terms

First published in 1908, *The Blue Lagoon* follows two young cousins, Dick and Emmeline Lestrange, whose voyage across the Pacific is transformed by disaster. Cast away far from the familiar structures of European society, they must gradually learn how to live in an isolated tropical environment.

Stacpoole combines maritime adventure with an unusual story of childhood, memory, survival, and growing maturity. The lagoon is at once refuge, playground, source of food, and boundary, while objects carried from the lost world of ships and cities slowly acquire new meanings. Paddy Button, the Irish sailor who initially protects the children, provides both practical knowledge and one of the novel’s most distinctive voices.

The novel also belongs to a particular moment in Edwardian culture. Its vision of the South Pacific, its ideas about nature and civilisation, and its treatment of childhood and sexuality reflect assumptions that can feel distant to a modern reader. This edition provides concise historical and cultural explanations without modernising or rewriting Stacpoole’s original text.

The reading notes placed before each chapter offer useful context, explain unfamiliar practices and vocabulary, and draw attention to details of setting or narrative form without revealing what happens next. The explanatory notes that follow the chapters provide additional information on maritime terminology, historical references, natural history, cultural allusions, and Stacpoole’s narrative choices.

Together, these additions are intended to make *The Blue Lagoon* easier to enter, richer to reread, and more understandable in the historical and literary world from which it emerged.