Alfred Edward Woodley Mason was born on 7 May 1865 in Camberwell, London, to a chartered accountant, William Woodley Mason, and Elizabeth Hobill Gaines Mason. The pressures from a stuffy and conventional family drove him to seek escape in books and (while at Dulwich College) to an interest in the theater. He took a second-class honors degree in classics at Trinity College, Oxford, but the friendships he made there (especially with Anthony Hope Hawkins and Arthur Quiller-Couch) influenced the direction his life would take. His choice of the stage before making the switch to writing freed him from family domination, enlarged his circle of acquaintances, and gave him that practice with dramatic construction which served him well in his second career. To the chagrin of his family he joined Edward Compton's Comedy Company and, on 6 August 1888, made his first stage appearance performing the role of a servant in William Muskberry's Davy Garrick. He was in the first production of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man. His first publication, a play entitled Blanche de Malétroit and based on Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Sire de Maletroit's Door," appeared in 1894. Among his friends, Oscar Wilde and Quiller-Couch encouraged him to finish his first novel.
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