We begin with a play and a party. In December 1899 The Ghost, a play by Henry James, Robert Barr, George Gissing, H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, H. B. Marriott-Watson, H. G. Wells, Edwin Pugh, A. E. W. Mason and Stephen Crane, had its first and last performance in a village schoolhouse in Sussex. Besides the eponymous ghost, the dramatis personae seem uncannily familiar, including as they do a Dr Moreau, a Peter Quint and, with a nod to Gilbert and Sullivan, ‘Three Little Maids from Rye’. To mark the arrival of the new century, Crane had invited a large party, including some of the authors of The Ghost, and other well-known men of letters, to spend Christmas and New Year's Eve with him and his wife at Brede Place, near Rye, a partly modernized medieval manor house. In his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), H. G. Wells tries to evoke the spirit of the occasion: