Paperback novella: Mary Panton walls up her desires in a beautiful villa high up in the hills above Florence, as she calmly contemplates her disastrous marriage.
But a single act of compassion begins a nightmare of violence that shatters her serenity.
She turns for help to the notorious Rowley Flint, and through him comes to realise that to deny love, with all its passions and risks, is to deny life itself.
A fast-paced story, Up at the Villa (1941, 2004) incorporates elements of the crime and suspense novel. Somerset Maugham donated the manuscript of Up at the Villa to Rupert Hart-Davis to sell in 1960 to raise money for the London Library; it sold for £1,100.
The novella was adapted as the 2000 film Up at the Villa, directed by Philip Haas. The movie starred Kristin Scott Thomas, Anne Bancroft, James Fox, Derek Jacobi, and Sean Penn. In the film, subplots were added to expand the material to feature film length, which reviewers and cinema goers criticised.
About the author: William Somerset Maugham was born in 1874 and lived in Paris until he was ten. He was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Heidelberg University. He spent some time at St Thomas' Hospital with the idea of practising medicine but the success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, published in 1897, won him over to letters. Of Human Bondage, the first of his masterpieces, came out in 1915, and with the publication in 1919 of The Moon and Sixpence, his reputation as a novelist was established.
At the same time his fame as a successful playwright and short story writer was being consolidated with acclaimed productions of various plays and the publication of The Trembling of a Leaf, subtitled Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, in 1921, which was followed by seven more collections. His other works include travel books, essays, criticism and the autobiographical The Summing Up and A Writer's Notebook.
In 1927, Somerset Maugham settled in the South of France and lived there until his death in 1965.
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