"The Fall of Edward Barnard," as well as many of Maugham's other South Sea stories, were originally published in a commercial magazine. The story then appeared as one of six in the collection The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands (1921). The volume was popular with the reading public and received some critical acclaim. Louise Maunsell Field, in the New York Times, admires Maugham's delineation of character, in which "there is a broader sympathy, a deeper, clearer comprehension, a finer tolerance than any shown in his earlier work." Rebecca West, however, is more critical. Writing in the New Statesman, she censures Maugham for a "certain cheap and tiresome attitude towards life, which nearly mars these technically admirable stories." She accuses Maugham of being cynical for satirizing the earnestness of Bateman Hunter in "The Fall of Edward Barnard."

During the 1920s and beyond...