A review by octavia_cade
Liza of Lambeth by W. Somerset Maugham

3.0

Short novel about young, slum-dwelling Liza, who gets involved with a much older married man when she shouldn't. It doesn't end well for anyone. Maugham wrote this when he was a medical student, doing his obstetrics rotation in Lambeth, and there's a very sort of Call the Midwife undertone to a lot of this. Only an undertone, because a lot more emphasis is given to Liza's relationship and how it impacts on others, but it's there.

Coming from first-hand experience, there's a lot of verisimilitude here, but it doesn't quite have the character-building that Maugham is so excellent at in his later work. You can see it coming - Liza's mother, I thought, was particularly well-drawn for the relatively minimal page time she gets - but it's not a patch on The Painted Veil.