W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham was a British playwright, novelist and short-story writer whose career made him one of the most commercially successful English-language authors of the early twentieth century. Trained as a physician, he turned to literature after the success of his first novel and later travelled extensively.

His best-known works include Of Human Bondage , The Moon and Sixpence , The Painted Veil and the Ashenden stories. Many draw on historical settings and real individuals while exploring ambition, artistic obsession, illness and moral compromise. Somerset Maugham comes from the connection between this individual life and the larger political, social or cultural changes of the period, rather than from the headline episode alone.

Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors imagines W. Somerset Maugham arriving in Penang in 1921 with Gerald Haxton, ill, financially anxious and searching for material he can turn into fiction. At Cassowary House he listens as Lesley Hamlyn gradually reveals her connection to Sun Yat-sen’s fundraising and the Ethel Proudlock murder case. Maugham’s position as both guest and writer lets the novel explore how private confidences, colonial scandal and suppressed sexuality can be transformed into literature—and who owns a story once an author decides to use it.