Cakes and Ale/The Painted Veil/Liza of Lambeth/The Razor's Edge/Theatre/The Moon and Sixpence

Fülszöveg

William Somerset Maugham was one of the most
popular writers of this century and his novels
have taken their place as established classics of
English Literature. Liza of Lambeth was his first novel
(1897) and is a brilliant and harshly realistic portrait of
contemporary Cockney London. Written much later,
Theatre also demonstrates Maugham's love of London and
the West End life. In Cakes and Ale, Rosie, a former
barmaid, is the irresistibly affectionate and artless
character at the centre of a circle of literary lions, who were
considered by Maugham's irate contemporaries to be
caricatures of Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole.
The revolt of the individual against conventional social
values and customs is Maugham's principal preoccupation
in the other three novels. In The Moon and Sixpence, George
Strickland, a middle-aged businessman, throws up family
and career to pursue an obsession for painting. He lives in
Paris before obeying the dictates of his art and travelling
first to the South of France and then to his death in Tahiti.
A young American in The Razor's Edge likewise abandons
a promising career and travels extensively searching for
peace of mind. The Painted Veil is a passionate tale of a
young wife's infidelity. Her husband forces her to give up
her lover and follow him to China where eventually she
finds fulfilment and a greater happiness working with the
stricken inhabitants of a cholera-ridden city. Vissza