Lorna's Reviews > The Painted Veil

The Painted Veil was a beautiful literary classic by masterful writer W. Somerset Maugham. In the Introduction to the edition that I read it is noted that this first was published in serialized form in Cosmopolitan appearing from November 1924 until March 1925 and later serialized in England. It was also adapted into theater and films.

But what I found most interesting was the Preface where Maugham notes that when he was twenty and a student at St. Thomas's Hospital, he was given six weeks vacation over Easter. He left with his gladstone bag and twenty pounds setting off for Genoa and Pisa, then Florence where he found board and lodging seeing the dome of the cathedral from his window. As he recalls, the woman had a vineyard on the Tuscan Hills and the best chianti ever. The widow's daughter gave him an Italian lesson each day where the rest of the day he could wander along the Arno. Having already read a translation of Dante's Inferno with Ersilia's help, he started on the Purgatorio. She told him a story of Pia of Siena, suspected of adultery by her husband as he plotted her death. The theme haunted him for many years and he said that it wasn't until he made the long journey to China that it all fell into place:

"I think this is the only novel I have written in which I started from a story rather than from a character. It is difficult to explain the relation between character and plot. You cannot think very well of character in the void; the moment you think of him in some situation, doing something; so that the character and at least his principle action seem to be the result of of simultaneous act of the imagination. But in this case the characters were chosen to fit the story I gradually evolved; they were constructed from persons I had long known in different circumstances."

This is an engrossing tale of love and disappointment of a young British couple marrying for all of the wrong reasons. The drama of their lives plays out in a remote and beautiful Chinese village in the midst of a cholera epidemic in the 1920s. This elegant novel talks about a marriage gone awry as well as self-discovery and awareness and forgiveness. It is a beautiful and endearing book.

"You know, my dear child, that one cannot find peace in work or in pleasure, in the world or in a convent, but only in one's soul."

"Like a rich melody on a harp that rang in exultant arpeggios through the complicated harmonies of a symphony, one thought beat in her heart consistently. It was this thought which gave their exotic beauty to the rice fields, which made a little smile break on her pale lips as a smooth-faced lad swung past her on his way to the market town with exultation in his carriage and audacity in his eyes, and which gave the magic of a tumultuous life to the cities she passed through."