The most famous novel by Somerset Maugham.
A subtle, acidly ironic story of a brilliant, clever actress, marking her 'mid-life crisis' with an affair with a handsome young 'predator'?
A 'Vanity Fair' of the roaring twenties?
Or a timeless, utterly captivating book in which every reader finds something personally for themselves?
'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players!'
So it was — and so it will always be!
William Somerset Maugham was an English writer, one of the most successful prose writers of the 1930s, and an agent of British intelligence.
Somerset Maugham was born into the family of a lawyer at the British embassy in France. His parents deliberately arranged for the birth to take place on embassy grounds so that the child would have legal grounds to say he had been born on British territory: it was expected that a law would be passed under which all children born on French territory would automatically become French citizens and, upon reaching adulthood, would thus be liable for military se…
