[Maugham wrote] novels about the kind of English society he knew best, doctors, the clergy, the military, the lawyers, and the formidable womenfolk who ruled their servants and their husbands with rods of iron: the good people who were the traditional fodder of the English novelist. (p. 35)

The main novels in which we find Maugham's anatomy of Edwardian England and its values are The Hero (1901), Mrs. Craddock (1902), The Merry-Go-Round (1904) and The Explorer (1909). All of them have at their centres situations in which the English gentleman finds his code of conduct woefully inadequate in dealing with the realities of life and in which he arrives through crisis at a painful maturity. (pp. 35-6)

The Hero (1901) is an early landmark in Maugham. It is his first sustained attack on contemporary middle-class values from within the framework of English society and it shows his remarkable ability among his countrymen to mount...