# The Moon and Sixpence
**The Moon and Sixpence** is a novel by the British writer William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), first published in London by William Heinemann in 1919[1](https://www.themorgan.org/printed-books/85276). It tells the story of Charles Strickland, a middle-aged London stockbroker who abruptly abandons his wife and children to devote himself to painting, and it is loosely based on the life of the French Post-Impressionist painter [Paul Gauguin](https://www.edgepedia.org/paul-gauguin)[2](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311983.2026.2684808) • [3](https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-moon-and-sixpence). The story is told in episodic form by a first-person narrator, a writer who reconstructs Strickland's life from his own encounters and from the recollections of people who knew him[4](https://books.google.com/books?id=TfI-AQAAIAAJ) • [5](https://arpgweb.com/pdf-files/ellr5%286%29111-116.pdf).
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Author and date | W. Somerset Maugham; first published London, William Heinemann, 1919[1](https://www.themorgan.org/printed-books/85276) |
| Protagonist | Charles Strickland, a London stockbroker who leaves his wife and children to paint[2](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311983.2026.2684808) |
| Real-life basis | Loosely based on the life of Paul Gauguin, though not a biography[3](https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-moon-and-sixpence) • [6](https://uzsmart.uz/kitoblar/files/Elektron%20kutubxona/Ingliz_tili_va_adabiyoti/English%20literature%20M%20Bakoyova%20Tashkent%202006.pdf) |
| Narration | First-person homodiegetic narrator, a writer who records the protagonist's life[5](https://arpgweb.com/pdf-files/ellr5%286%29111-116.pdf) |
| Setting | London, Paris, and Tahiti, contrasting English social constraint with the freedom of the South Pacific[7](https://catalog.tln.lib.mi.us/?currentIndex=0&resourceid=13003569§ion=resource&view=lookInsideDetailsTab) |
| Central theme | The conflict between collective society and individual authenticity, and the cost of artistic genius[8](https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-moon-and-sixpence/themes/society-vs-authenticity) • [9](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/109391/the-moon-and-sixpence-by-w-somerset-maugham/) |
## Plot and structure
Strickland is a prosperous stockbroker who, at the age of forty, gives up his wife and children and goes to Paris to study art[6](https://uzsmart.uz/kitoblar/files/Elektron%20kutubxona/Ingliz_tili_va_adabiyoti/English%20literature%20M%20Bakoyova%20Tashkent%202006.pdf). His life there is a bitter struggle against every sort of difficulty, but he is indifferent to comfort; canvas and paint are the only things he needs. He never sells his pictures and cares for neither fame nor wealth; his stated aim is to create beauty[6](https://uzsmart.uz/kitoblar/files/Elektron%20kutubxona/Ingliz_tili_va_adabiyoti/English%20literature%20M%20Bakoyova%20Tashkent%202006.pdf).
The narrator, an unnamed writer with a background similar to Maugham's, recalls and talks about Strickland[5](https://arpgweb.com/pdf-files/ellr5%286%29111-116.pdf) • [10](https://ir.library.osaka-u.ac.jp/repo/ouka/all/25177/OLR42-077.pdf). In Paris, Strickland ruins the life of the Dutch painter Dirk Stroeve and Stroeve's wife, who had nursed him through a dangerous illness[6](https://uzsmart.uz/kitoblar/files/Elektron%20kutubxona/Ingliz_tili_va_adabiyoti/English%20literature%20M%20Bakoyova%20Tashkent%202006.pdf). He eventually moves on to Tahiti, where the narrator later travels and interviews people who knew him, assembling the final picture of his life and work[3](https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-moon-and-sixpence).
The novel's structure rests on an opposition between the constraints of English society and the freedom Tahiti provides, while Paris, where Strickland is poor and develops his skills as a painter, serves as an in-between zone linking the two worlds.[7](https://catalog.tln.lib.mi.us/?currentIndex=0&resourceid=13003569§ion=resource&view=lookInsideDetailsTab)
## Gauguin and the question of biography
Maugham makes use of outstanding incidents from Gauguin's life, though the novel cannot be regarded as his biography[6](https://uzsmart.uz/kitoblar/files/Elektron%20kutubxona/Ingliz_tili_va_adabiyoti/English%20literature%20M%20Bakoyova%20Tashkent%202006.pdf). Maugham visited Tahiti in 1914 and met with and interviewed people who had personally known Gauguin, much as his narrator does with Strickland's former acquaintances[3](https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-moon-and-sixpence). Maugham seems to have composed a large part of the book in the summer of 1918, a season he spent with his wife, Syrie, and their small daughter, Liza, in a house he had leased close to Farnham in rural Surrey.[7](https://catalog.tln.lib.mi.us/?currentIndex=0&resourceid=13003569§ion=resource&view=lookInsideDetailsTab)
**Visual quotation.** Laurence Wright, a scholar at North-West University, established in a 2014 study that Maugham, in describing the paintings Strickland produces, drew on actual works by Gauguin, sometimes referring to specific paintings and at other times to phases of his career[11](https://journals.co.za/doi/10.4102/lit.v35i1.1141). For readers familiar with Gauguin's output, this insistent visual quotation creates what Wright calls a disturbing sense of aesthetic dissonance: it becomes difficult to accept the inarticulate, surly, and joyless fictional Strickland as the source of paintings that possess their own real history and provenance[11](https://journals.co.za/doi/10.4102/lit.v35i1.1141). A related note identifies one described scene as a conflation of three Gauguin paintings, *L'Offrande* (1902) and the similar compositions *Maternité I* and *Maternité II* (both 1899)[12](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0895769X.2017.1354284).
Makiko Nakai of Osaka University has argued that Maugham anticipated accusations of misusing real people: the novel's opening chapters are written on purpose to frame the book not as a biographical novel but as what Maugham called "the protest of romance," a dramatizing of historical facts and invention of fictions[10](https://ir.library.osaka-u.ac.jp/repo/ouka/all/25177/OLR42-077.pdf). She concludes that the narrator, Strickland, and Stroeve can all be regarded as Maugham's personas[10](https://ir.library.osaka-u.ac.jp/repo/ouka/all/25177/OLR42-077.pdf).
## Themes and characters
The novel's central claim, as LitCharts summarizes it, is that collective society is the enemy of individual authenticity: only by defying or fleeing society can the individual live a truly authentic life[8](https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-moon-and-sixpence/themes/society-vs-authenticity). Strickland is presented as selfish, cruel, pitiless, and cynical; the reader dislikes him as a human being while appreciating him as a talented artist whose passionate devotion to his art arouses admiration[6](https://uzsmart.uz/kitoblar/files/Elektron%20kutubxona/Ingliz_tili_va_adabiyoti/English%20literature%20M%20Bakoyova%20Tashkent%202006.pdf). Penguin's edition describes Strickland's tortured and cruel soul as a symbol of both the blessing and the curse of transcendent artistic genius, and of the cost in human lives it sometimes demands[9](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/109391/the-moon-and-sixpence-by-w-somerset-maugham/).
**Women in the novel.** The book portrays three principal female figures connected to Strickland: his wife Amy, Blanche Stroeve, and Ata, the Tahitian woman who lives with him[13](https://xuebaosk.ahut.edu.cn/article/doi/10.3969/j.issn.1671-9247.2018.02.013?viewType=citedby-info). Feminist critics have read these portrayals in different ways. Paola Della Valle, a scholar of English and postcolonial literature, argues that Maugham's depiction of Western women can be seen both as a criticism of old femininities and as a plea for new models, with reference to the first wave of feminism spreading in the early twentieth century[14](https://iris.unito.it/handle/2318/1654426). Yanli Han and Malini N. G. Ganapathy read Mrs. Strickland as a capable, shrewd, and empathetic woman whose internal conflicts arise from patriarchal traditions and conservative beliefs, shaped both by Maugham's own beliefs and by the limitations of the era[15](https://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ells/article/view/0/49139). Other critics go further: Lu Wang argues that Maugham possessed a particular bias against women, evident in his depiction of the novel's female characters[16](https://ojs.usp-pl.com/index.php/ADVANCES-IN-HIGHER-EDUCATION/article/viewFile/9862/9359), and a Chinese study concludes that the novel reveals prejudice against women implicit in literature and the exclusion and contempt of women in practical society[13](https://xuebaosk.ahut.edu.cn/article/doi/10.3969/j.issn.1671-9247.2018.02.013?viewType=citedby-info).
## Narrative technique
The story is narrated by a first-person homodiegetic narrator, a biographer figure who records the protagonist's life, and the novel's two distinctive narrative techniques are unreliable narration and its handling of narrative tense[5](https://arpgweb.com/pdf-files/ellr5%286%29111-116.pdf). A study of first-person narration in the novel contends that the device goes beyond being mere technique: by means of a narrator who concedes his shortcomings, guesses openly, and refrains from delivering a final verdict, Maugham produces a work that undermines its own authority even as it spins an absorbing tale[17](https://buxdu.uz/media/jurnallar/ilmiy_axborot/3_Adabiyotshunoslik_va_gumanitar_fanlar_Ilmiy_axboroti__2_2026_6_QaOXXZ8.pdf). Nakai's study takes its title, "The Faculty for Myth," from the novel's own framing of Strickland's story as legend rather than documentary record[10](https://ir.library.osaka-u.ac.jp/repo/ouka/all/25177/OLR42-077.pdf).
## Publication and reception
The first edition appeared from William Heinemann in London in 1919; the Morgan Library holds a copy described as "first edition, 1st issue," in a printing by Billing and Sons of Guildford[1](https://www.themorgan.org/printed-books/85276). American editions appeared the same year from Doubleday, George H. Doran, Grosset & Dunlap, and the [Modern Library](https://www.edgepedia.org/modern-library)[18](https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Maugham%2C+W.+Somerset+%28William+Somerset%29%2C+1874-1965).
The novel reconfirmed the reputation Maugham had established with *Of Human Bondage* (1915)[19](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/eibeibunka/26/0/26_KJ00002055246/_article/-char/en). LitCharts notes that Maugham may have taken the title from a quotation in a negative review of that earlier novel[3](https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-moon-and-sixpence). The moon and the sixpence have been read as symbols of the ideal and the mundane, an interpretation that has been applied by various researchers[20](https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ells/article/download/0/0/49139/52995).
## International afterlife
The novel has had a substantial life in translation and in other literatures. Two well-known Chinese versions, by Fu Weici and by Li Jihong, have been compared in narratological studies of how unreliable narration and narrative tense are recreated in the target texts[5](https://arpgweb.com/pdf-files/ellr5%286%29111-116.pdf). In Korea, the scholar Yoo Jun has examined the novels of Oh Jeong-Hee as a critical conversation with *The Moon and Sixpence*, which Oh described as a "Urszene" (primal scene) for her: she was deeply moved by the novel yet transformed and resisted its romantic vision in creating her own narrative and ethics[21](https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBean.artiId=ART001747362). A comparative study has also paired the novel with [Kim Dong-in](https://www.edgepedia.org/kim-dong-in)'s "Pyro-sonata" as the two works in their authors' corpora most strongly marked by art-for-art's-sake aestheticism, reading both protagonists as artists whose absorption in their artistic impulse destroys their practical lives[22](https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBean.artiId=ART001979856).
Gauguin's life has been retold in fiction more than once. [Mario Vargas Llosa](https://www.edgepedia.org/mario-vargas-llosa)'s *The Way to Paradise* (2003) explicitly takes Gauguin as a character, whereas *The Moon and Sixpence* transmutes his life into that of the fictional English painter Charles Strickland[3](https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-moon-and-sixpence).
## References
1. [The moon and sixpence : a novel / by W.S. Maugham, The Morgan Library & Museum](https://www.themorgan.org/printed-books/85276)
2. [Paradox of freedom: coastal islands as absolute and abstract space in The Awakening and The Moon and Sixpence, Cogent Arts & Humanities](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311983.2026.2684808)
3. [The Moon and Sixpence Study Guide, LitCharts](https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-moon-and-sixpence)
4. [The Moon and Sixpence, William Somerset Maugham, Google Books (Grosset & Dunlap, 1919)](https://books.google.com/books?id=TfI-AQAAIAAJ)
5. [Tongtong Zhang (2019). A Comparative Study of Two Chinese Versions of The Moon and Sixpence: A Narratological Perspective, English Literature and Language Review 5(6)](https://arpgweb.com/pdf-files/ellr5%286%29111-116.pdf)
6. [English literature (M. Bakoyova, Tashkent, 2006), course text on The Moon and Sixpence](https://uzsmart.uz/kitoblar/files/Elektron%20kutubxona/Ingliz_tili_va_adabiyoti/English%20literature%20M%20Bakoyova%20Tashkent%202006.pdf)
7. [The Library Network catalog entry for The moon and sixpence](https://catalog.tln.lib.mi.us/?currentIndex=0&resourceid=13003569§ion=resource&view=lookInsideDetailsTab)
8. [Society vs. Authenticity Theme in The Moon and Sixpence, LitCharts](https://www.litcharts.com/lit/the-moon-and-sixpence/themes/society-vs-authenticity)
9. [The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham, Penguin Random House](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/109391/the-moon-and-sixpence-by-w-somerset-maugham/)
10. [Makiko Nakai (2003). 'The Faculty for Myth': The Narrative Strategy of The Moon and Sixpence, Osaka Literary Review 42](https://ir.library.osaka-u.ac.jp/repo/ouka/all/25177/OLR42-077.pdf)
11. [Laurence Wright (2014). References to Gauguin paintings in Somerset Maugham's The moon and sixpence, Literator 35(1)](https://journals.co.za/doi/10.4102/lit.v35i1.1141)
12. [Laurence Wright (2018). "Picturing" Mrs. Stroeve, in Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, ANQ 31(1)](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0895769X.2017.1354284)
13. [李振华 (2018). 《月亮和六便士》中的女性形象 [The Images of Women in The Moon and Sixpence]](https://xuebaosk.ahut.edu.cn/article/doi/10.3969/j.issn.1671-9247.2018.02.013?viewType=citedby-info)
14. [Paola Della Valle (2017). W.S Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence: A Reflection on Genius, Gender Roles and Making Sense of One's Life, Quaderni di Studi Italiani e Romeni 7](https://iris.unito.it/handle/2318/1654426)
15. [Yanli Han and Malini N. G. Ganapathy (2023). Mrs. Strickland's Personality in William Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence—from the Perspective of Feminist Criticism, English Language and Literature Studies 13(3)](https://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ells/article/view/0/49139)
16. [Lu Wang. An Analysis of William Somerset Maugham's Sexual Prejudice in The Moon and Sixpence, Advances in Higher Education 7(23)](https://ojs.usp-pl.com/index.php/ADVANCES-IN-HIGHER-EDUCATION/article/viewFile/9862/9359)
17. [First-person narration in The Moon and Sixpence, Literary Criticism collection, Bukhara State University](https://buxdu.uz/media/jurnallar/ilmiy_axborot/3_Adabiyotshunoslik_va_gumanitar_fanlar_Ilmiy_axboroti__2_2026_6_QaOXXZ8.pdf)
18. [W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), The Online Books Page, University of Pennsylvania Libraries](https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Maugham%2C+W.+Somerset+%28William+Somerset%29%2C+1874-1965)
19. [Naomi Ohno (1996). A Study on The Moon and Sixpence: Devoted admirers of art, Eibeibunka 26](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/eibeibunka/26/0/26_KJ00002055246/_article/-char/en)
20. [Symbolism in The Moon and Sixpence, English Language and Literature Studies full text (CCSE)](https://ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/ells/article/download/0/0/49139/52995)
21. [Yoo Jun (2013). A Experimental Study on Oh Jeong Hee's Novels — Focusing on the relation with William Somerset Maugham's novel The Moon and Sixpence, The Journal of Humanities 34(1)](https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBean.artiId=ART001747362)
22. [Kim Youngji (2015). Art of Tragedy Born by Insanity — Focusing on The Moon and Sixpence and Pyro-sonata, 인문과학연구 44](https://www.kci.go.kr/kciportal/ci/sereArticleSearch/ciSereArtiView.kci?sereArticleSearchBean.artiId=ART001979856)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Literature and written works › Creative written works and worlds › Prose fiction › Standalone novels › Classic novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries › Modernist and early 20th-century novels*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license