I’ve always loved a good party. When I was a child, I started planning for my birthday party in July. By August, I’d sent out hand-drawn invitations. By September, I was impatiently dreaming of cake, balloons and pass-the-parcel. I was born in November.

I continue to find them alluring. At a good party, there’s a sense that normal behavioural constraints are relaxed; a feeling that anything goes and that anything could happen. It’s why they make such perfect backdrops for fiction: you see the constant tension between who someone is and who someone wants to be. In life, as in novels, they are the perfect place to people-watch.

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That’s why I chose to set my new novel at a party. The story takes place over one evening at a glamorous 40th birthday in a stately home in the English countryside, where two best friends are brought together and reveal dark truths about each other.

A lot of my real-life experiences went into in the scene-setting (I used to be a newspaper diarist – essentially getting paid to party every night). But I was also influenced by great festivities in fiction. Here are 10 of my favourites.

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Oblonsky’s ball in Anna Karenina is perhaps not as famous as the scene in War and Peace when Andrei and Natasha waltz for the first time, but its impact is as quietly devastating. Kitty (the unwitting rival for Count Vronsky’s affections) has earlier urged Anna to wear a flashy lilac dress. But Tolstoy puts his heroine in a modest black velvet gown. Kitty notes sadly that Anna’s charm “consisted precisely in the fact that she always stood out from what she wore”. Vronsky notices it too and swiftly falls in love. The rest is (doomed) history.

2. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

All parties in fiction have a neo-Platonic ideal of the perfect occasion to which they aspire. In my case, it was Jay Gatsby’s parties during the long, hot summer of 1922. Gatsby’s gatherings epitomise the spirit of prohibition-era decadence: endless champagne, chorus girls, flappers and bootleggers. And Fitzgerald writes them like a dream.



3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Austen’s books are liberally scattered with wonderfully observed balls and dances. But for my money, the most memorable is the one at Meryton where Mr Darcy refuses to dance with glorious Lizzy Bennet, dismissing her as “tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me”. He sees the error of his ways before long.

4. The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

There’s a magnificent scene in Hollinghurst’s Booker-winning novel in which his hero, Nick Guest, ends up dancing with the then prime minister Margaret Thatcher while off his face on cocaine and booze. Thatcher is dressed in a “wide-shouldered white and gold jacket, amazingly embroidered, like a Ruritanian uniform” and the unlikely duo take to the dancefloor “to the thump of Get Off of My Cloud”.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Behind the masque … Tom Hanks as Sherman McCoy and Melanie Griffith as Maria Ruskin in the film of The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Photograph: Warner Bros/Allstar

5. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

When Wall Street trader Sherman McCoy and his wife Judy attend a Fifth Avenue dinner party thrown by egregiously sophisticated hosts, he finds himself awkwardly sitting next to his secret mistress. The dinner is referred to as The Masque of the Red Death (a nod to the Edgar Allen Poe story of the same name) and the other guests are the usual Wolfeian mix of pretentious aristos, supposedly sophisticated celebrities and “social x-rays in puffed dresses … starved to near perfection”.



6. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Woolf follows a day in the life of London socialite Clarissa Dalloway as she makes last-minute preparations for that evening’s gathering, where the novel’s cast will be brought together in a final tying-up of narrative threads. Woolf is excellent at conveying the noise, smells and rhythm of a party, with all its mannered fraudulence and dramatic ironies.



7. Vanity Fair by William Thackeray

Not strictly a fictional party, but a fictional rendering of a real-life event, namely the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, held in 1815 as a celebration for the Duke of Wellington’s officers in Brussels. It was here that Wellington received word that Napoleon’s forces were on the march. As a result, the story goes, many of the guests ended up fighting in evening dress. Amelia Sedley’s husband, George Osborne (no relation to the former chancellor), is one of those called to battle: “Away went George, his nerves quivering with excitement …”



8. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

Another Darcy, but this time dressed in a horrible golfing jumper (“what seemed from the back like a harmless navy sweater was actually a V-neck diamond-patterned in shades of yellow and blue”) and a guest at Geoffrey and Una Alconbury’s horrific New Year turkey curry buffet. Poor old Bridget is hungover and late because she got lost on the motorway and can’t think of anything to say when Mark Darcy asks her what books she’s read lately.

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9. Some Hope by Edward St Aubyn

St Aubyn, one of the greatest prose stylists in modern literature, is merciless in his satirising of snobs. Nowhere is this more in evidence than at the birthday party of ghastly toff Sonny Gravesend. Here Princess Margaret makes an appearance, talking “about ‘the ordinary people in this country’ in whom she had ‘enormous faith’ based on a combination of complete ignorance about their lives and complete confidence in their royalist sympathies”.



10. Invitation to the Waltz by Rosamond Lehmann

This wonderfully perceptive, intelligent novel opens with 17-year-old Olivia Curtis readying herself for her first ball. Once there, she meets the dashing, aristocratic Rollo Spencer: a man who will influence her life for decades to come. Shy, self-conscious and constantly in the shadow of her more socially adept sister, Olivia encapsulates what it is to be on the brink of womanhood, worried that the boy you like won’t like you back. When we meet her again in Lehmann’s sequel, The Weather in the Streets, Olivia is about to embark on an affair with a married man – with all the emotional complexity that entails.



• The Party by Elizabeth Day is published by 4th Estate priced £12.99. It is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £11.04.