Sara's Reviews > The Painted Veil

I was fascinated by the character of Kitty Fane. She is purported to be shallow and empty, but she is in fact braver than I could ever imagine being and willing to look at herself and her follies head on and call them for what they are. She is often unlikeable, she is punished beyond the pale, and she is humanly flawed. She does an enormous amount of growing and maturing during the course of the novel and every stage of her growth seemed realistic for her circumstances.

Kitty makes two mistakes. The first is marrying in haste someone who she knows little or nothing about, and with whom she is not remotely in love, in order to escape the humiliation of watching her younger sister make the fortuitous marriage that was expected for Kitty but never came. The second is engaging in an affair with a cad and believing in him wholly.

Women have so few choices in Kitty's world. They are expected to marry and be kept by a husband. For love they often look outside marriage. Kitty is not able to realize that her husband is an exceptional man, and she squanders his affections and their possibilities on what she comes to recognize as an animal passion.

I loved the movie, but Hollywood has transformed this into a romance, and that is clearly not what Maugham wrote. In many ways, they are two separate stories and Kitty is not the same character, although she arrives at much the same place.