W. Somerset Maugham · 1925 · exile

Somerset Maugham's 1925 novel. Kitty marries a quiet bacteriologist to escape her mother and her own approaching thirties, goes with him to Hong Kong and takes a lover. When he finds out, he accepts a posting to a cholera-stricken town in the Chinese interior and requires her to come - a punishment that turns into the only serious thing that has happened to either of them.

1. 1
   London

   Kitty Garstin is pretty, twenty-five and running out of seasons, and accepts Walter Fane - a government bacteriologist she barely notices - largely because her younger sister has become engaged first.

2. 2
   Hong Kong

   In colonial Hong Kong she finds the society dull and her husband duller, and begins an affair with the Assistant Colonial Secretary - who, when Walter discovers it, declines with perfect composure to leave his wife.

3. 3
   Mei-tan-fu

   Walter volunteers for a cholera epidemic inland and gives Kitty the choice of coming or being divorced publicly. There she finds him working himself to death, nuns running an orphanage, and the first real work of her life.

4. 4
   London

   She comes home widowed and pregnant, and the woman who returns is not the one who left - the book ending not with romance but with a plain intention to raise a daughter who will not need any of this.