The roman a clef, the novel using real people as bases for characters with different names (and sometimes different qualities), is an old genre of fiction. An early example, Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey (1818), for example, satirizes Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley.

Other titles, employing artists as the subjects, include Maugham's own Of Human Bondage and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). The Kunstlerroman genre (artist as suffering hero) is equally as well represented, particularly by a spate of works beginning at the turn of the century: Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved (1903), D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers (1913; see separate entry), Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark (1915), Theodore Dreiser's The Genius (1915), and many more.