ABSTRACT
Somerset (1874-1965). English writer, born in Paris, the son of a solicitor and legal adviser to the British embassy. He was orphaned by the age of ten and sent to Whitstable, Kent, to live with his aunt and uncle. He attended King’s School, Canterbury, and later Heidelberg University and St Thomas’s Hospital, London. In 1897 he received his medical MRCS and LRCP but his success as a novelist with his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), diverted him from medicine to literature. The novel drew on his experiences of London slums and the inadequacy of medical attention to those dwelling there. He achieved fame with Lady Frederick (1907), a comedy of marriage. His playwriting proved so successful that in 1908 he had four plays running simultaneously in London. He continued to write plays until 1933 but stopped when he thought that his themes were no longer of interest to theatre managers. Among his best-known plays are Our Betters (1917), The Circle (1921), East of Suez (1922), The Constant Wife (1926), and For Services Rendered (1932), an anti-war play. In his work Maugham avoided all discussion of homosexuality but his private life was dominated by his relationship with Gerald Haxton, eighteen years his junior, whom Maugham had met in 1914 in Flanders, and who became his secretary and companion until his death in 1944. Before that, in 1911, Maugham met Syrie Wellcome, the daughter of Dr Barnardo (of Barnardo Homes for orphans) who was then the wife of a US businessman. Their child Liza was born in 1915, and in 1917 they married. The marriage was rather unorthodox, with much time spent apart. It ended in divorce in 1927. By that time Maugham had established a permanent relationship with Haxton, with whom he spent much time travelling to the South Seas, to China, Mexico, South-east Asia, and a number of other countries. In 1926 Maugham bought a house, the Mauresque, in Cap Ferrat, France, where he lived for most of the rest of his life. Apart from plays he wrote a thinly disguised autobiographical novel entitled Of Human Bondage (1915), The Moon and the Sixpence (1919), based on the life of the painter Gauguin, Cakes and Ale (1930), based on the life of Thomas Hardy, and The Razor’s Edge (1944). He produced a number of other volumes, novels, short stories, and plays. In his autobiography The Swimming Up (1938) he described himself as ‘in the first row of second-raters’.
