The Painted Veil
She married for security, not love. An affair for excitement, not passion. And when her husband Walter discovered her betrayal, his revenge was elegant in its cruelty: accompany me to a cholera epidemic in rural China, or face a public divorce and social ruin. So Kitty Fane finds herself in a dying village, surrounded by French nuns who have given their lives to the suffering, and by a husband who now speaks to her only through formalities. Stripped of the Hong Kong society that defined her, she confronts for the first time the painted veil she has worn over her own emptiness. Maugham writes with clear-eyed precision about the economics of desire and the masks we wear, but his novel is ultimately a testament to the human capacity for transformation. Kitty enters this hellish village one person and emerges another, capable of love she never knew she could feel.
