William Somerset Maugham
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English
Description
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 was autobiographical, more is pure invention. Of Human Bondage is often included in lists of best English-language novels of the 20th century.
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English
Description
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 bank-balance like the scorpions of Rehoboam to chastise them, and, like many another pious creature, for their soul's good making all and sundry excessively miserable. Nurtured in the evangelical ways current in her youth, she insisted that her connections should seek salvation according...
3) Orientations
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English
Description
Xiormonez is the most inaccessible place in Spain. Only one train arrives there in the course of the day, and that arrives at two o'clock in the morning; only one train leaves it, and that starts an hour before sunrise. No one has ever been able to discover what happens to the railway officials during the intermediate one-and-twenty hours. A German painter I met there, who had come by the only train, and had been endeavouring for a fortnight to get...
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English
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These are the memoirs of the Beato Giuliano, brother of the Order of St Francis of Assisi, known in his worldly life as Filippo Brandolini; of which family I, Giulo Brandolini, am the last descendant. On the death of Fra Giuliano the manuscript was given to his nephew Leonello, on whom the estates devolved; and has since been handed down from father to son, as the relic of a member of the family whose piety and good works still shed lustre on the...
5) The Hero
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English
Description
James Parsons returns from the Boer War a changed man. In his idyllic and stifling British village awarded the Victoria Cross for an act of bravery, he considers the medal unwarranted. He was praised and respected in the village of Little Primpton before breaking off his engagement to the woman who has been waiting five years for his return.
6) The Explorer
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English
Description
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 of the horizon was clear and delicate. The shingly beach, no less deserted, was thick with tangled seaweed, and the innumerable shells crumbled under the feet that trod them. The breakwaters, which sought to prevent the unceasing encroachment of the waves, were rotten with...
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English
Description
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 Craddock, her steward. Herself a member of the landed gentry, Bertha has been raised to cultivate an immoderate desire for knowledge and to understand, and enjoy, European culture of both past and present ages. In particular, during long stays on the Continent, she has learned...
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English
Description
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 with white crests, and boisterous. It is not so often that it is calm and blue. Then, indeed, the blue is arrogant. The sun shines fiercely from an unclouded sky. The trade wind gets into your blood and you are filled with an impatience for the unknown. The billows, magnificently...
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English
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On a Chinese Screen is a travel book made of a series of short sketches Maugham made during a trip along the Yangtze River. Although ostensibly about China, the book is equally focused on the various westerners he met during the trip and their struggles to accept or adapt to the cultural differences they encounter, which are often as enormous and as alienating as the country itself.
11) The Magician
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English
Description
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 caricature of Aleister Crowley, attempts to create life. Crowley wrote a critique of this book under the pen name Oliver Haddo, in which he accused Maugham of plagiarism.
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English
Description
Strickland is a well-off, middle-class stockbroker in London sometime in late 19th or early 20th century. Early in the novel, he leaves his wife and children and goes to Paris. He lives a destitute but defiantly content life there as a painter, lodging in run-down hotels and falling prey to both illness and hunger. Strickland, in his drive to express through his art what appears to continually possess and compel him on the inside, cares nothing for...
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English
Description
A drawing-room in O'Farrell's house in John Street. It is very prettily but not extravagantly furnished. The O'Farrells are a young married couple of modest income. It is between six and seven in the evening. Peyton, a neat parlour-maid, opens the door and shows in Mr. Davenport Barlow. Barlow is a short, self-important person of middle age. He is very bald, red in the face, and wears a small, neatly curled moustache; he is dressed in the height of...
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English
Description
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 sister-in-law Gertie and life becomes a hardship. The hired man Frank Taylor owns a farm of his own, but a storm has destroyed his crops and forced him to work. Shortly after Nora's arrival he leaves for his farm. Nora hears a remark that he intends to get a woman to be his wife and...
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The world takes people very willingly at the estimate in which they hold themselves. With a fashionable bias for expression in a foreign tongue it calls modesty mauvaise honte; and the impudent are thought merely to have a proper opinion of their merit. But Ponsonby was really an imposing personage. His movements were measured and noiseless; and he wore the sombre garb of a gentleman's butler with impressive dignity. He was a large man, flabby and...
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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 a scandal after divorcing his father many years before. Arnold's wife, Elizabeth, is looking forward to meeting Lady Catherine, who she sees as a romantic figure for having sacrificed her social position in England for love.
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English
Description
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 piano, and a great many flowers. There is an archway at the back, leading into another drawing-room, and it is through this that visitors are introduced by the butler. On the left is a large bow window, and on the right a door leading into the library.
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English
Description
Lady Kelsey's drawing room in Mayfair. At the back is a window leading on to a balcony. On the right, a door leads to the staircase, and on the left is another door. It is the sumptuous room of a rich woman. Lady Kelsey is seated, dressed in black; she is a woman of fifty, kind, emotional, and agitated. She is drying her eyes. Mrs. Crowley, a pretty, little woman of twenty-eight, very beautifully dressed, vivacious and gesticulative, is watching her...
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English
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That's why I'm running all over the place to find him. You know he's a relation of the Hollingtons. I was at her ladyship's not half an hour ago-the Dowager, you know-my firm has acted for the whole family for the last hundred years. Well, I'd hardly arrived before a message came from the War Office to say that her grandson, the present lord, had been killed in India. So, as soon as I could, I bolted round here. Mr. Halstane is the next heir, and...
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English
Description
Drawing-room of the Hotel Splendide at Monte Carlo. A large, handsomely furnished room, with doors right and left, and French windows at the back leading to a terrace. Through these is seen the starry southern night. On one side is a piano, on the other a table with papers neatly laid out on it. There is a lighted stove. Lady Mereston, in evening dress, rather magnificently attired, is reading the papers. She is a handsome woman of forty. She puts...