Shallow, poorly educated Kitty marries the passionate and intellectual Walter Fane and has an affair with a career politician, Charles Townsend, assistant colonial secretary of Hong Kong. When Walter discovers the relationship, he compels Kitty to accompany him to a cholera-infested region of chinese mainland, where she finds limited happiness working with children at a convent...
Shallow, poorly educated Kitty marries the passionate and intellectual Walter Fane and has an affair with a career politician, Charles Townsend, assistant colonial secretary of Hong Kong. When Walter discovers the relationship, he compels Kitty to accompany him to a cholera-infested region of chinese mainland, where she finds limited happiness working with children at a convent. But when Walter dies, she is forced to leave China and return to England. Generally abandoned, she grasps desperately for the affection of her one remaining relative, her long-ignored father. In the end, in sharp, unexamined contrast to her own behavior patterns, she asserts that her unborn daughter will grow up to be an independent woman. The Painted Veil was first published in 1925 and is usually described as a strong story about a woman's spiritual journey. To more pragmatic, modern eyes, Kitty's emotional growth appears minimal. Still, if not a major feminist work, the book has literary interest. Sophie Ward's uninflected reading is competent if not compelling.
William Somerset Maugham, CH (January 25, 1874 – December 16, 1965) was an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer. He was one of the most popular authors achieving recognition as the highest paid of his profession during the 1930s.
Commercial success with high book sales, successful play productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market i...
William Somerset Maugham, CH (January 25, 1874 – December 16, 1965) was an English playwright, novelist, and short story writer. He was one of the most popular authors achieving recognition as the highest paid of his profession during the 1930s.
Commercial success with high book sales, successful play productions and a string of film adaptations, backed by astute stock market investments, allowed Maugham to live a very comfortable life. Small and weak as a boy, Maugham had been proud even then of his stamina, and as an adult he kept churning out the books, proud that he could.
Yet, despite his triumphs, he never attracted the highest respect from the critics or his peers. Maugham himself attributed this to his lack of "lyrical quality", his small vocabulary and failure to make expert use of metaphor in his work.
It seems equally likely that Maugham was underrated because he wrote in such a direct style. There was nothing in a book by Maugham that the reading public needed explained to them by critics. Maugham thought clearly, wrote lucidly, and expressed acerbic and sometimes cynical opinions in handsome, civilized prose. He wrote in a time when experimental modernist literature such as that of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was gaining increasing popularity and won critical acclaim. In this context, his writing 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"[16].
Maugham's homosexual leanings also shaped his fiction, in two ways. Since, in life, he tended to see attractive women as sexual rivals, he often gave the women of his fiction sexual needs and appetites, in a way quite unusual for distinguished authors of his time. "Liza of Lambeth," "Cakes and Ale" and "The Razor's Edge" all featured women determined to service their strong sexual appetites, heedless of the result.
Also, the fact that Maugham's own sexual appetites were highly disapproved of, or even criminal, in nearly all of the countries in which he traveled, made Maugham unusually tolerant of the vices of others. Readers and critics often complained that Maugham did not clearly enough condemn what was bad in the villains of his fiction and plays. Maugham replied in 1938: "It must be a fault in me that I am not gravely shocked at the sins of others unless they personally affect me."
Maugham's public account of his abilities remained modest; toward the end of his career he described himself as "in the very first row of the second-raters". In 1954, he was made a Companion of Honour.
Maugham had begun collecting theatrical paintings before the First World War and continued to the point where his collection was second only to that of the Garrick Club[17]. In 1948 he announced that he would bequeath this collection to the Trustees of the National Theatre, and from 1951, some 14 years before his death, it began its exhibition life and in 1994 they were placed on loan to the Theatre Museum in Covent Garden.
![[英国] 威廉·萨默塞特·毛姆](https://img3.doubanio.com/view/personage/m/public/7bb374fa2a2cbe9680efabfe451e51c2.jpg)
威廉·萨默塞特·毛姆 作者
芒果奶酱
重庆出版社2012版
亚比煞
重庆出版社2006版
MK™
重庆出版社2012版
苹果
重庆出版社2006版
可可胡
黑龙江科学技术出版社2016版
萨尔斯堡的树枝
重庆出版社2012版
分裂人木屋
江西人民出版社2016版
2 有用 shirley 2016-04-27 23:07:55
电影改动太大，毛姆知道了估计要跳脚。
3 有用 不死的缺水鱼 2015-06-17 22:32:41
与电影的爱情和救赎的主题相比，书更像是一个女性的自我觉醒
0 有用 Zii 2015-06-04 21:27:50
结尾太平了吧 感觉像草草收尾 不爱的人永远无法爱上吗 本能的爱和精神的爱 没有前者 后者的力量竟会如此薄弱吗
0 有用 KingKongdaisy 2010-11-11 16:52:02
毛姆的小说读来总是有种很轻松的感觉。很复杂的故事却能让人读得很轻松。或许就是make the readers feel clever的典型？
0 有用 Up 2017-08-12 22:54:08
结尾有点仓促。”The dog it was that died“听起来像是苦涩的自嘲，Walter是原谅Kitty了吧，可是他原谅自己了么。Kitty到最后对Walter有的也只是pity没有爱这真是毛姆会有的写法