Cakes and Ale
'Cakes and Ale' has our narrator, as usual, a thinly veiled Maugham, reflecting on his memories and experiences with a recently deceased elder-statesmen novelist and his first wife, Rosie. When a writer of popular historical romances assigns himself the role of biographer, with Driffield's second and more respectable wife's blessing, he asks our narrator for the details of the marriage, but he isn't interested in the full story. Rosie was an out-sized character and inspired many of her husband's early writing, but she doesn't leave an appropriate impression on her former husband's legacy.
The novel was as casually elegant as I should expect a work by Maugham to be. It was also more optimistic. The positive messages in the In the 'The Razor's Edge' and 'The Moon and Sixpence' were undercut by the unhappiness of those left behind by their protagonists. Here, our narrator seems more upset at the inconvenience Rosie and Driffield's relationship caused himself then anything else.
Not that this should be overlooked, Maugham uses the novel to meditate on the meaning of fame in literature, how it comes about and how legacy's are maintained. The hypocrisy of the guardians of respectability is given ample room to display itself. To be honest, I most enjoyed the lingering descriptions of interiors and the Edwardian perspective of Rosie's modern attitudes towards sex and love.
