Of Human Bondage

Philip Carey, orphaned and born with a club foot, tries and abandons accountancy, then painting in Paris, then settles into medicine in London — and spends the middle of the book in a humiliating, self-destroying attachment to a waitress named Mildred. Maugham’s most autobiographical novel, and a deliberately unconsoling one: the education it describes is the slow subtraction of illusions, including the illusion that suffering means something. It earns a place in a formation curriculum precisely as the counterweight to books in which effort is rewarded.

Context: W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) qualified as a physician before writing full time. Of Human Bondage appeared in 1915 and its reputation was made largely by Theodore Dreiser’s review of it.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction.
• W. Somerset Maugham — the author.
• Ambition — the engine of the plot, and its undoing.