The Painted Veil
by W. Somerset Maugham
Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictured there,
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave
The shadows, which the world calls substance, there.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Maugham’s novel The Painted Veil was first serialised in Hearst’s International Magazine exactly 100 years ago, between November 1924 and March 1925. It was first published in book form on 23 April 1925.
Why not read The Painted Veil this year, to make its centenary?
A little about Somerset Maugham:
Maugham’s first language was French. He was born in Paris to British parents, who both died before his eleventh birthday. He was then raised by an emotionally distant uncle, the vicar of Whitstable, before studying literature at Heidelberg University and medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital in London.
After the publication of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, in 1897, he abandoned his studies and became a playwright and novelist. He was very successful: in 1908 he had four plays running simultaneously in London’s West End.
During the First World War he drove ambulances for the British Red Cross and also worked as a spy in Switzerland and Russia. He had an affair with Syrie Wellcome, the estranged wife of the pharmaceuticals magnate Henry Wellcome. Syrie divorced Wellcome and married Maugham, but it was not a happy partnership: after twelve acrimonious years they separated, and Maugham spent the rest of his life on the French Riviera, living with first Gerald Haxton and then Alan Searle. ‘I tried to persuade myself that I was three-quarters normal and that only a quarter of me was queer,’ he once told his nephew – ‘whereas really it was the other way around.’
He wrote dozens of novels, short stories and plays, the most famous of which are Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Cakes and Ale (1930) and The Painted Veil (1925).
In The Painted Veil, shallow Kitty Fane is stuck in a loveless marriage to a Hong Kong bacteriologist. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him into the heart of a cholera epidemic in mainland China.
Maugham’s title comes from Shelley’s posthumously published sonnet (see above). The premise comes from a line in Dante’s Purgatorio: ‘Siena made me, Maremma unmade me: this he knows who after betrothal espoused me with his ring’.
In a subsequent preface, Maugham explains the connection:
Pia was a gentlewoman of Siena whose husband, suspecting her of adultery and afraid on account of her family to put her to death, took her down to his castle in the Maremma the noxious vapours of which he was confident would do the trick; but she took so long to die that he grew impatient and had her thrown out of the window. . . . The story for some reason caught my imagination. I turned it over in my mind and for many years from time to time would brood over it for two or three days. I used to repeat to myself the line: Siena mi fé; disfecemi Maremma. But it was one among many subjects that occupied my fancy and for long periods I forgot it. Of course I saw it as a modern story, and I could not think of a setting in the world of to-day in which such events might plausibly happen. It was not till I made a long journey in China that I found this. I think this is the only novel I have written in which I started from a story rather than from a character.
In the same preface, Maugham describes some of the legal problems he faced with this novel:
I had with this book some of the difficulties that are apt to befall an author. I had originally called my hero and heroine Lane, a common enough name, but it appeared that there were people of that name in Hong-Kong. They brought an action, which the proprietors of the magazine in which my novel was serialised, settled for two hundred and fifty pounds, and I changed the name to Fane. Then the Assistant Colonial Secretary, thinking himself libelled, threatened to institute proceedings. I was surprised, since in England we can put a Prime Minister on the stage or use him as the character of a novel, an Archbishop of Canterbury or a Lord Chancellor, and the tenants of these exalted offices do not turn a hair. It seemed to me strange that the temporary occupant of so insignificant a post should think himself aimed at, but in order to save trouble I changed Hong-Kong to an imaginary colony of Tching-Yen.
Later editions reverted to Hong Kong but the name Fane has been retained.
The Painted Veil has been adapted several times for stage and screen, most recently in the 2006 film directed by John Curran, starring Naomi Watts and Edward Norton. In 2024, Naomi Watts said that The Painted Veil was her most underrated film: ‘It was a really lovely film – that nobody saw. It just sort of went by.’ You can stream it now in the UK and the US.
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If you’re reading along with Anna Karenina, The Old Curiosity Shop or The Counterfeiters - I hope you’re enjoying them! We’ll start discussing The Counterfeiters this Friday.
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Oh, what a marvellous choice! I LOVED The painted veil! I read Somerset Maugham in my very early twenties while at University and enjoyed it so much that when I started teaching English -back in Buenos Aires- I "fed" my students with his short stories. At least one of those students remains a S Maugham convert to this day :-). About ten years ago, I went into a feverish re-reading phase and fell in love again with his works with a much more mature view and appreciation. HAPPY READING TO ALL YOUR FOLLOWERS, Henry, and thank you for this!
I've read quite a lot of Maugham, but not The Painted Veil so I'll be adding it to my reading list now.