The Pacific is inconstant and uncertain like the soul of man. Sometimes it is grey like the English Channel off Beachy Head, with a heavy swell, and sometimes it is rough, capped...

All her life Miss Elizabeth Dwarris had been a sore trial to her relations. A woman of means, she ruled tyrannously over a large number of impecunious cousins, using her...

On her 21st birthday, when she comes into her deceased father's money, Bertha Ley announces, to the dismay of her former guardian, that she is going to marry 27-year-old Edward...

Maugham wrote The Magician in London, after he had spent some time living in Paris, where he met Aleister Crowley. In this tale, the magician of the title, Oliver Haddo, a...

Of Human Bondage is Maugham's masterpiece strongly autobiographical in nature, although Maugham denied this stating that this was a novel not an autobiography, though much in it...

A drawing-room at Lord Francis Etchingham’s house in Norfolk Street, Park Lane. An Adam room, with bright chintzes on the furniture, photographs on the chimney-piece and the...

Liza of Lambeth depicts the short life and death of Liza Kemp, an 18-year-old factory worker who lives with her aging mother in the fictional Vere Street off Westminster Bridge...

When her employer dies, leaving her penniless, Nora Marsh decides to make her home with her brother Edward (Johnston) in Canada. She cannot, however, get along with her...

At the beginning of the play, the house-proud Arnold Champion-Cheney is dreading the first visit of his mother and her new husband, who left England for Italy under the shadow of...

The sea was very calm. There was no ship in sight, and the sea-gulls were motionless upon its even greyness. The sky was dark with lowering clouds, but there was no wind. The line...