Of Human Bondage: W. Somerset Maugham (Everyman's Library CLASSICS) - Hardcover

Maugham, W. Somerset

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1841593699 ISBN 13: 9781841593692

Publisher: Everyman, 2015

Synopsis

After 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.

About this title

Review:

"A 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)

Book Description:

Set at the end of the nineteenth century, Maugham’s semi-autobiographical novel is an unforgettable portrait of Philip Carey, an orphan with a club foot, desperate for knowledge and experience, as he struggles to find his way in a world that is as rigid as it is unforgiving.

About this edition

• Publisher: Everyman
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1841593699
• ISBN 13: 9781841593692
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 360