Of Human Bondage

After a lonely boyhood and the painful ordeal of his schooldays Philips yearning for adventure takes him to Germany and later Paris where he tries to make his mark as an artist before returning to London to study medicine. Here a tortured and one-sided love affair with Mildred a vulgar yet irresistible waitress changes the course of his life for ever.Commenting later on the novel’s autobiographical aspects Maugham recalled how in writing the book he mingled fact and fiction and found myself free from the pains and unhappy recollections that had tormented me.However like Dickens’s David Copperfield to which it is often compared Of Human Bondage goes far beyond autobiography and is Maugham’s most ambitious and unsparing novel revealing the author’s undoubted gift for storytelling as he explores the timeless theme of human freedom - freedom to act to think and to love. Review A work of genius. -- Theodore DreiserInAspects of the Novel E.M. Forster wrote: The final test of a novel will be our affection for it as it is the test of our friends of anything else that we cannot define. He might have been writing about W. Somerset Maughams masterpieceOf Human Bondage. -- Robert McCrum ―Guardian (2014)I do not know of any living writer who seems to have his work so much under control. -- Evelyn WaughA deeply imagined and powerfully moving novel. ―New Yorker (2010)Maugham who usually cultivated a fastidious detachment shows in this work a personal commitment that was unusual sweeping the reader up in his own passionate intensity. -- Selina Hastings About the Author William Somerset Maugham famous as novelist playwright and short-story writer was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at Kings School Canterbury and at Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St. Thomas Hospital with a view to practising medicine but the success of his first novel Liza of Lambeth published in 1897 won him over to letters. Of Human Bondage the first of his masterpieces came out in 1915 and with the publication in 1919 of The Moon and Sixpence his reputation as a novelist was established. His position as a successful playwright was being consolidated at the same time. His first play A Man of Honour was followed by a series of successes just before and after World War I and his career in the theatre did not end until 1933 with Sheppey. His fame as a short story writer began with The Trembling of a Leaf subtitled Little Stories of the South Sea Islands in 1921 after which he published more than ten collections. His other works include travel books such as On a Chinese Screen and Don Fernando essays criticism and the autobiographical The Summing Up and A Writers Notebook.In 1927 he settled in the south of France and lived there until his death in 1965.Selina Hastings is a writer and journalist biographer of Somerset Maugham Evelyn Waugh Nancy Mitford and Rosamund Lehmann and in The Red Earl of her father.She is the winner of the Marsh Biography Prize the Spears Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Biographers Club Lifetime Services to Biography Award.