Description
Book SynopsisAfter a lonely boyhood, and the painful ordeal of his schooldays, Philip's 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.
Trade ReviewA work of genius. -- Theodore Dreiser
In
Aspects 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 Maugham's masterpiece,
Of 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 Waugh
A 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
