She often betrays him, going off with his other men friends, steals from him, and scorns his sexuality. Mildred is "boy-like", vulgar and contemptuous of her crippled lover. Maugham was a self-hating homosexual, and his picture of Mildred as Philip's love-object reflects the trials of a young gay man in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde case. Now begins the most poignant and memorable passage of the novel, Carey's hopeless affair with Mildred, a waitress. After a closely observed passage through boarding school, Philip escapes to study in Heidelberg, enjoys a brief spell as a struggling but failing artist in Paris, and then returns home. Raised by his clergyman uncle, the boy is imprisoned in late-Victorian vicarage life dreaming of his release from bondage, and praying to an indifferent God to have his disability healed. Like Maugham, who was a homosexual with a bad stammer, he is afflicted with a disabling deformity, a club foot. Philip Carey is an orphan hungry for love and experience. Perhaps not since David Copperfield, an obvious inspiration ( No 15 in this series), had an English writer mined his own life so explicitly or so ruthlessly. Maugham's unforgettable portrait of Philip Carey is one that teenagers, typically, will ingest like junkies, not least because Maugham poured so much of himself into the plot of the novel and its strangely sympathetic protagonist. It earns its place in this list for the edgy economy of its dark, often cruel narrative more than its style (prosaic) or its humanity (tormented). For English readers, this is a Bildungsroman we mostly first encounter as adolescents. I n Aspects of the Novel, EM Forster wrote: "The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, of anything else that we cannot define." He might have been writing about W Somerset Maugham's masterpiece, Of Human Bondage.