Mrs Craddock (Penguin Classics)

Mrs Craddock (Penguin Classics)

“There is something bracing about the sincerity of [Maugham's] style . . . a style that serves his general purpose of stripping life to the bone with a thin, sharp knife that lays open to view the normal flesh and the healthy flow of blood as well as the cancerous sore beneath.” —Leslie A. Marchand,  The New York Times Edward Craddock is a thoroughly good man. He may lack his wife Bertha’s education, but he is unfailingly good-humored, handsome, placid, and popular. It is hardly surprising that Bertha adores him. But expending all one’s passion, all one’s spirit, on a man who is so undemonstrative, so unimaginative, can be very trying, as Bertha soon discovers.   In this penetrating study of an unequal marriage, W. Somerset Maugham explores the nature of love and happiness and finds that the two rarely coincide. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. A young woman, carried away by passion, sees a chance to escape a dull life and to experience true love. But she discovers that little in her marriage to the dutiful and sensible Edward meets her expectations. And as passion dies, she finds herself trapped in a loveless, oppressive marriage. W. Somerset Maugham  (1874-1965) lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He afterwards walked the wards of St. Thomas's Hospital with a view to practice in medicine, but the success of his first novel,  Liza of Lambeth  (1897), won him over to letters. Something of his hospital experience is reflected, however, in the first of his masterpieces,  Of Human Bondage  (1915), and with  The Moon and Sixpence  (1919) his reputation as a novelist was assured. His position as one of the most successful playwrights on the London stage was being consolidated simultaneously. His first play,  A Man of Honour  (1903), was followed by a procession of successes just before and after the First World War. (At one point only Bernard Shaw had more plays running at the same time in London.) His theatre career ended with  Sheppey  (1933). His fame as a short-story writer began with  The Trembling of a Leaf , sub-titled  Little Stories of the South Sea Islands , in 1921, after which he published more than ten collections. W. Somerset Maugham's general books are fewer in number. They include travel books, such as  On a Chinese Screen  (1922) and  Don Fernando  (1935), essays, criticism, and the self-revealing  The Summing Up  (1938) and  A Writer's Notebook  (1949). He became a Companion of Honour in 1954. Robert Calder is professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. Introduction Somerset Maugham’s first published work, Liza of Lambeth, was a remarkable success for a beginning author. Published in September 1897, the novel was praised by a number of respected critics and, because it was mentioned in a Sunday night sermon at Westminster Abbey, its first printing was sold out. The young writer had demonstrated a deft hand at dialogue, an ability to create a vivid scene with a few carefully selected details, and a gift for drawing memorable characters. The strength of the book, however, lay in its authentic picture of the life of London’s poor that Maugham had observed when his duties as a medical student at St. Thomas’s Hospital required his venturing into the nearby slums. Protected by his doctor’s bag, he was led to the bedside of the ill and the dying “through the dark and silent streets of Lambeth, up stinking alleys and into sinister courts where the police hesitated to penetrate.” Liza of Lambeth’s detailed re-creation of these experiences within the poor, uneducated underclass of London was timely. Under the influence of the French naturalists—notably Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and Edmond and Jules Goncourt—the last two decades of the nineteenth century had seen an outpouring of British realistic slum fiction. Arthur Morrison used his experiences in London’s East End to write the powerfully evocative Tales of Mean Streets (1894) and A Child of the Jago (1896); George Gissing produced a number of grimly realistic novels, notably Workers in the Dawn (1880) and The Nether World (1889); Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot” (1893); and a multitude of lesser-known authors—Hubert Crackanthorpe, Edwin Pugh, St. John Adcock, Richard Whiteing, and William Pett Ridge, among others—made their reputations with stories of the down-and-out of London’s ghettos. Whether by astute planning or by fortunate coincidence, Maugham was able to contribute his own skillfully writt