Somerset Maugham

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Set in Cairo, Sir Arthur Little's marriage to the young Violet is endangered when she and his secretary Ronald Parry fall in love.
Arthur, compelled by official duty, keeps Parry in post despite personal cost; Violet renounces the affair to preserve honour and British interests.
After Parry saves Arthur from assassination the crisis ends in painful reconciliation: duty prevails, hearts remain wounded.

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Set in Peking, the play charts Daisy — a Eurasian woman married to Harry Anderson — and her illicit, long‑standing passion for George Conway.
Her amah and Lee Tai clandestinely expose George's letters and abet plots that result in a street attack, George's wounding and eventual suicide, and the collapse of the couple's secrecy.
Confronted with exposure and ruin, Daisy assumes a Chinese guise as Harry returns with the incriminating correspondence, leaving moral and relational consequences unresolved.

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Lady Wanley and Ambrose Holland trick the snobbish Parker-Jenningses by presenting Jack Straw, a witty Grand Babylon waiter, as the missing Archduke Sebastian.
Jack prolongs the imposture, wins Ethel’s sympathy, baffles the hosts and is unexpectedly confirmed by Count von Bremer and the Emperor.
The household’s pretensions are exposed and Mrs Parker-Jennings is publicly humiliated while Jack secures imperial approbation and the heroine’s favor.

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At Kenyon‑Fulton Squire Claude rigidly enforces an estate rule and orders the gamekeeper Gann’s daughter Peggy away when she is found “in trouble,” and Peggy kills herself to spare her father. Grace, Claude’s wife, tormented by a past affair with Henry Cobbett and by her failure to intervene, debates confession and repentance amid the family’s petty hypocrisies. Ultimately she suppresses disclosure, resolves to reform for Claude’s sake, and the drama exposes class prejudice, moral rigidity and the fraught possibility of forgiveness.

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Bertha, married to the earnest but dull Edward, becomes disillusioned, flees to Rome and London, and is swept into a brief, passionate affair with the young Gerald. She rejects him, returns to Court Leys; Edward dies in a hunting accident, and she responds with numbness, remorse, and the deliberate destruction of their relics. Gradually she grows resigned to a quieter, solitary life and decides to leave Blackstable to travel and keep her inner world to herself.

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A three-act comedy of manners in which impecunious Gerald Halstane unexpectedly inherits a peerage, jeopardising his secret engagement to Nellie Sellenger. Mrs. Worthley (Mrs. Dot) engineers social manoeuvres—special licences, staged flirtations and a sabotaged motor—to unsettle attachments and promote alternative matches. After misunderstandings and an elopement, Freddie and Nellie pair off and Gerald, freed from his promise, and Mrs. Worthley acknowledge mutual love.

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Philip Carey, driven by poverty into work as a shop-walker and window-dresser at Lynn & Sedley, is later recognised for design ability, returns to medical study, qualifies and takes hospital and locum posts.
Confronted with his uncle’s protracted illness and inheritance, Mildred’s collapse, and a growing attachment to Sally, he endures ethical conflict—including contemplation of hastening his uncle’s death—and ultimately elects marriage over planned foreign travel.
The book furnishes sustained social and professional observation, examining class, labour, medical practice, ambition and moral compromise.

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A series of short moral tales—set in Spain, Holland and provincial England—traces lives undone or redeemed by ambition, passion, religious doubt and social hypocrisy. Through ironic reversals and vivid character sketches (Don Sebastian, James Clinton, Brother Jasper, Amyntas, Valentia and Daisy), the pieces probe conscience, charity, love and the public performance of virtue.

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Comic three-act domestic play built on misunderstandings: Penelope summons family with mysterious telegrams, provoking rival interpretations and comic scenes.
She confronts husband Dickie’s flirtation with Ada Fergusson, follows her mathematician father’s calculated advice to feign indifference and regain his affections.
Penelope’s stratagems expose the affair, prompt Dickie’s remorse, and the couple reconcile.

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Major John returns from the Front engaged to Sylvia but reveals he has lost his Christian faith, distressing his devout parents and fiancée. When the dying Colonel Wharton seeks spiritual comfort, Sylvia tricks John into receiving Communion to ease the father, with unexpected moral consequences. The Colonel dies at peace after a last sacrament; John’s belief and their engagement collapse, and Sylvia renounces marriage to dedicate herself to God.

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Canon Theodore Spratte, socially ambitious and tactically artful, thwarts his daughter Winnie’s engagement to the Socialist Bertram Railing and engineers her marriage to Lord Wroxham while pressing his own ecclesiastical advancement. Using social influence—most decisively the brewer Sir John Durant’s power—he obtains the bishopric of Sheffield and secures a marriage into Durant’s family himself. The story anatomizes class prejudice, familial vanity and clerical hypocrisy, showing private ambition reshaping public and domestic life.

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Lucy, still in love with Alec MacKenzie, breaks off her engagement amid the scandal that accuses Alec of sacrificing George Allerton. Julia contrives a meeting in which Lucy and Alec confess their mutual devotion, but Alec, bound by duty and wounded pride, sails for a perilous African expedition while promising to return. The story probes public censure, personal sacrifice, and the conflict between love and honour.

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James Parsons deliberately loads a gun and shoots himself while ostensibly "cleaning" it, staging his suicide as an accident after making farewell calm with his family. In the epistolary epilogue, Clara Clibborn privately insists it was suicide motivated by love for her, recounts local reactions, and notes Mary’s subsequent marriage to the curate, revealing social hypocrisy and self‑interest.

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Norah Marsh, a long-serving companion left out of her mistress’s will, emigrates to Canada and enters a tense household on her brother’s farm where class friction and domestic rivalries escalate.
Impulsively marrying farmhand Frank Taylor, she endures a violent, coercive beginning to their marriage but gradually adapts and they develop mutual understanding.
When Frank’s crop is condemned, an unexpected legacy from Miss Wickham’s family (converted to dollars) rescues the farm and cements their renewed commitment.

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Arthur, Susie and Dr. Porhoët discover a secret, overheated laboratory in the attics where Haddo has been manufacturing life: jars contain grotesque, semi‑human monstrosities and the evidence of horrific experiments.
They find Haddo dead (strangled; Arthur claims responsibility), Arthur rushes the others out, and they watch Skene consumed by fire as dawn breaks.

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Narrator laments a life wasted and denied happiness, finding only fleeting solace in charity toward the poor and anguishing over fate and the meaning of suffering. The text closes with an outcry of love for Giulia, a brief bilingual poetic fragment on human blindness and return to the "great Antique Mother," and a Project Gutenberg acknowledgement.

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Interwoven domestic tragedies expose social pretence and moral weakness: Basil’s passion for Hilda precipitates his wife Jenny’s despair and suicide, while Grace Castillyon’s liaison with Reggie culminates in confession, a servant girl’s death and, after anguish, reconciliation with her husband Paul.
Frank Hurrell and Miss Ley function as pragmatic moral agents—averting scandal, subsidising and counselling the afflicted—while secondary figures (Reggie, Lauria, Herbert, Bella) illustrate vanity, loss and quiet courage.
The novel satirises Victorian respectability but closes on repentance, small mercies and an affirmation of life’s beauty over doctrinal rigidity.

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Dr. and Madame Coutras report that Strickland painted a visionary series in Tahiti which, by his express wish after burial, was burnt to ashes by his companion Ata, thus destroying what they regarded as masterpieces.
Dr. Coutras shows the narrator a surviving "fruit-piece" whose abnormal colours and sensuality encapsulate Strickland’s disturbing aesthetic.
The narrator returns to London, informs Mrs. Strickland and her children of Charles’s death, notes reproductions of his work in her home, and learns that Ata and Strickland’s son went to the Marquesas.

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A three-act drama in which Catherine Winter rebels against her husband George, a charismatic but morally corrupt financier whose private affairs and schemes entangle her family and the political establishment.
George’s fraudulent use of company bonds to buy a Central American mine triggers blackmail, financial panic and Catherine’s anguished renunciation of divorce to avert wider ruin.
Despite an election victory and a late seeming turn in the mine’s fortunes, George disappears amid the crisis and is apparently run down on the railway, leaving the household shattered.

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The fervent missionary Davidson converts and disciplines Sadie Thompson, driving himself into obsessive ministrations and ultimately committing suicide by cutting his throat on the beach. After his death Sadie instantly reverts to her former provocative, defiant comportment and the tale closes with an envoi comparing departures to the brief, severed ties of leis.

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In Victorian Vere Street a spirited working‑class girl, Liza Kemp, delights and provokes her neighbours — parading a new dress, refusing the shy suitor Tom and taking up with the married Jim Blakeston. Their affair brings gossip, humiliation, a savage public fight with Mrs. Blakeston, mounting drunkenness and social ostracism. Pregnant and fevered after a disastrous labour, Liza dies, the household and neighbourhood left to reckon with the tragedy.

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Julia Lambert, a celebrated actress, faces a painful confrontation with her son Roger, who denounces her life as endless make‑believe and demands "reality." She channels the episode into her work—deliberately upstaging Avice Crichton at rehearsal and triumphant on opening night—while juggling fraught relations with Michael, Tom and Charles. Afterward she retreats alone, celebrates her success and reaffirms that acting, not everyday sincerity, is her authentic realm.

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Kitty tells her father she is pregnant, confesses past faults and insists on having a daughter she will raise to be free, independent and fearless, which shocks him. She resolves to accept the past with hope, recalling a consoling sunrise on the journey with Walter that suggests a peaceful path ahead. The passage is followed by a glossary of difficult words and idioms.