But if nobody spoke unless they had something to say, Kitty reflected, with a smile, the human race would very soon lose the use of speech.” Of her husband: “He did not speak because he had nothing to say. “The dog it was that died” becomes a key line in the story. If you read this book, be sure to read this poem by Oliver Goldsmith written in 1766, An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog. Is he trying to kill her? Himself? Both of them? She has an affair and after he finds out, he announces they are going into rural China where a cholera epidemic is raging. You must give me time to get used to you.” In desperation the main character marries an MD bacteriologist who takes her to Hong Kong where he works as a scientist. She’s now 25 and her plainer, younger sister is engaged. The basic story is of a beautiful young British woman who has “played the field” too long. I had not read him lately so I forgot how good a writer he is. Wonderful writing and a good read from Maugham. After World War II, Maugham made his home in south of France and continued to move between England and Nice till his death in 1965.

He travelled all over the world, and made many visits to America. In this context, his plain prose style was criticized as 'such a tissue of clichés' that one's wonder is finally aroused at the writer's ability to assemble so many and at his unfailing inability to put anything in an individual way.ĭuring World War I, Maugham worked for the British Secret Service. Maugham wrote at a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and winning critical acclaim. For ten years before his first success, he almost literally starved while pouring out novels and plays. His parents died early and, after an unhappy boyhood, which he recorded poignantly in Of Human Bondage, Maugham became a qualified physician. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style. William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874.

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham