Of Human Bondage

Philip Carey is born with a clubfoot and orphaned before he can remember his mother. Raised by a cold uncle and doting aunt in a Georgian rectory, he grows up acutely aware of his body as something shameful, deformed, other. This awareness shapes everything: his desperate hunger for acceptance, his failed experiment with art in Paris, his retreat into medicine, and finally his catastrophic, obsessive love for a waitress named Mildred who treats him with contempt. Maugham's masterpiece traces theeducation of a sensitive man through the crucible of his own desires. Philip tries painting, medicine, travel; he pursues freedom through knowledge and finds only new forms of bondage. The title comes from Spinoza: we are bound by our passions, our bodies, our endless need for what hurts us. This is a novel about the humiliation of wanting, and the strange dignity in continuing to want anyway. A hundred years later, it remains astonishingly honest about the pain of being human.