Of Human Bondage

About the book

Philip Carey grows up an orphan under the care of relatives, with his disability making the scrutiny of other people an early and painful concern. Education, religious doubt, travel, artistic ambition, and medical study offer successive ways of imagining a life. His attachment to Mildred exposes a different kind of dependence, one that persists despite his capacity to recognize its destructive effects. Maugham follows the practical consequences of money, work, illness, and friendship alongside Philip's larger questions about meaning. The novel's long development gives disappointment time to alter an ambition rather than merely interrupt it. Its title reaches beyond one relationship to the habits of desire and expectation that bind a person, asking how freedom might emerge through experience without requiring complete mastery over feeling.

• Vocation
• Emotional dependence
• Disillusionment and growth

Why read it

For a sustained account of formation that gives work, money, belief, and difficult attachment equal power to shape a life.

Novel · English text