Mrs. Craddock
Review of the novel by Somerset Maugham
This novel begins with terse and memorable ironic wit like Oscar Wilde, like George Bernard Shaw. The British caste system and its related prejudices and pompous tomfoolery are easy targets. The author might very well have hammered home obvious messages of social justice, with the characters as pawns in a game of moral social-consciousness. But, miracle of miracles, the main character, Bertha AKA Mrs. Craddock comes alive and does what she will, and falls in and out of love, matures and falls in and out of love again, as she advances to the ripe old age of thirty. And the reader gets wrapped up in her life and the trite moral and social lessons are all forgotten. Her husband, from a slightly lower caste, who rises to the ranks of a gentleman through hard work and ingenuity and who might in the hands of a Tolstoy have become an exemplary figure like Levin in Anna Karenina is remembered by his widow and by the reader as an emotionless though well-meaning man, incapable of passionate love.
This is not a great work of literature, but I thoroughly enjoyed it because Bertha was so very much alive. And for me, that’s what makes a novel worth reading — plot be damned. I crave that illusion of getting into someone else’s skin, imagining what it would be like to live a life very different from my own. And Maugham is a master at that kind of magic, even in his minor works.
Another explanation of the pleasure of reading such a dated and long-forgotten novel appears on pp. 144–145
“She found unexpected satisfaction in the half-forgotten masterpieces of the past, in poets not quite divine whom fashion had left on one side, in the playwright, novelists, and essayists whose remembrance lives only with the bookworm. It is a relief sometimes to look away from the bright sun of perfect achievement; and the writers who appealed to their age and not to posterity have by contrast a subtle charm. Undazzled by their splendor, one may discern more easily their individualities and the spirit of their time; they have pleasant qualities not always found among their betters, and there is even a certain pathos in their incomplete success.”
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