Of Human Bondage (Full Version)

First published in 1915, Of Human Bondage is W. Somerset Maugham’s penetrating portrait of a young man’s painful education in life. After Philip Carey is sent to live with his stern, penny-pinching uncle and timid aunt in a provincial vicarage, he is shaped by grief, humiliation, and a restless desire to escape the limits placed on him by class, religion, and physical disability. As he moves through school, ambition, and the temptations of the wider world, Philip’s longing for meaning repeatedly collides with the messy realities of appetite and circumstance.

At once candid and compassionate, Maugham explores obsession, artistic yearning, sexual jealousy, and the uneasy pursuit of independence. The novel’s enduring power lies in its clear-eyed honesty: it refuses easy moral lessons while tracing, with remarkable psychological precision, how a person learns—slowly, imperfectly—to live with uncertainty and choose a life that is truly his own.

• Listeners who love coming-of-age classics that follow a protagonist through loss, education, and hard-won self-knowledge
• Fans of psychologically sharp, unsentimental fiction about desire, ambition, and the cost of emotional dependence
• Readers interested in early 20th-century English society—its religion, class expectations, and social constraints

W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) was one of the most widely read English writers of the 20th century, celebrated for his lucid style, sharp social observation, and humane skepticism. Trained as a doctor, he turned to literature and achieved success as a novelist, playwright, and master of the short story. His works often probe the tensions between respectability and desire, freedom and attachment, and the compromises demanded by ordinary life. Notable books include The Moon and Sixpence, The Razor’s Edge, and The Painted Veil. Of Human Bondage, strongly autobiographical, is widely regarded as his greatest novel.