Key themes
- The slavery of loving someone who doesn't love you back — and the freedom that comes after
- The artist who discovers he is not an artist
- The long, slow education that life provides against the quick lessons of youth
About this book
Philip Carey, orphaned and self-conscious about his club foot, grows up seeking freedom — from his religious guardian, from his art studies in Paris, from his obsessive and self-destructive love for a waitress named Mildred. Maugham's semi-autobiographical novel is one of the last great Victorian Bildungsromane and one of the most precise accounts of how the wrong person can own you.
Published in 1915, Of Human Bondage is Maugham's semi-autobiographical account of a young man's artistic and emotional education. He described it as the most personal thing he had written — 'a farewell to all that.'
Discussion questions
- Philip's obsession with Mildred is one of fiction's great portraits of destructive love. How does Maugham show the psychology — the willingness to return despite knowing exactly how it will end?
- Philip has a club foot and the novel traces what this limitation costs him and what it teaches him. What is Maugham saying about physical difference as a specific kind of education in the real?
- The novel is semi-autobiographical. How does knowing this affect your reading — and does it make Philip's choices more or less comprehensible?
- The ending is deliberately modest — Philip settles for contentment rather than greatness. What is Maugham saying about aspiration and its realistic costs?
- Of Human Bondage is unfashionable in literary circles but enormously read. What does it offer general readers that more 'literary' novels do not?
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