masquerades and fancy dress
Masquerades and fancy dress * Banquets and dinner parties * Soirées and drinks parties * Balls * Orgies, Wakes, etc.

The Manderley Fancy Dress Ball  
 from Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier   

The second Mrs Maxim de Winter lives in the shadow of her late predecessor Rebecca. In an attempt to win the respect of her aloof and cold husband she decides to revive the traditional of a costume ball at Manderley, the imposing Cornish stately home of which she is now mistress. However she is duped by the evil housekeeper Mrs Danvers into wearing same outfit as the glamorous and popular Rebecca had worn at the ball the previous year with disastrous social and personal consequences.

Mrs Leo Hunter’s Costume Breakfast
from The Pickwick Papers (1837) by Charles Dickens

The members of the Pickwick Club are sojourning in the Suffolk town of Eatanswill and are invited to be guests of honour at a fancy dress fête champêtre hosted by local poetess Mrs Leo Hunter. All the Eatanswill intelligentsia are present along with a smattering of literary lions from London who talk “pretty considerable nonsense” while being entertained by folk music of indeterminate ethnic origin. The highlight of the morning is to be a performance of Mrs Hunter’s magnum opus “Ode to an Expiring Frog” declaimed by the authoress herself dressed as Minerva.

 
The Masque of the Red Death
from The Masque of the Red Death (1842) by Edgar Allan Poe

The dominions of Prince Prospero are ravaged by the Red Death: a plague that kills its victims in less than thirty minutes, accompanied by agonising pain and a profuse bleeding of the pores. The prince decides to barricade himself inside an abbey with a thousand lords and ladies. Six months into their confinement, he holds a masquerade. “There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine.” But as the great clock in the black chamber strikes midnight a sinister, uninvited guest appears “tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave”.

The Strange Fete
From Le Grand Meaulnes (1913) by Alain-Fournier

Seventeen-year-old schoolboy Augustin Meaulnes gets hopelessly lost in central France in the depths of December. In trying to find a place to sleep for the night he stumbles across the Lost Estate, where a group of children are gathering for a weekend party to celebrate the engagement of the eccentric Frantz de Galais. Meaulnes is intoxicated by the ethereal tranquility of this party where the children make all the rules. Down at the boating lake he meets a bewitching and enigmatic young woman named Yvonne.

the Society of Artists' Fancy Dress Ball
From Steppenwolf (1927) by Hermann Hesse

Harry Haller, a 50 year old loner, depressive and self-styled Steppenwolf, is the last person you would expect to attend a lavish fancy dress ball. But after being given dancing lessons by his new best friend, local prostitute Hermine, he is persuaded to buy a ticket. On arriving he can find no sign of the enigmatic Hermine but instead is handed an invitation to the post-party party, a visit to the Magic Theatre (“price of admittance: your mind”) and things start to become extremely odd.