FAQ

The title is a reference to the Shelley sonnet 'Lift not the painted veil which those who live.' The entirety of this sonnet is as follows:

Lift not the painted veil which those who live Call Life: though unreal shapes be pictures there, And it but mimic all we would believe With colours idly spread, -- behind, lurk Fear And Hope, twin Destinies; who ever weave Their shadows, o'er the chasm, sightless and drear. I knew one who had lifted it -- he sought, For his lost heart was tender, things to love, But found them not, alas! nor was there aught The world contains, the which he would approve. Through the unheeding many he did move, A splendour among shadows, a bright blot Upon this gloomy scene, a Spirit that strove For truth, and like the Preacher found it not.

In the preface to this novel, Maugham wrote that this was the only novel based on a story rather than a character. He was thinking of Dante's Purgatorio, in which, he says he was told that "...Pia was a gentlewoman of Siena whose husband, suspecting her of adultery and afraid on account of her family to put her to death, took her down to his castle in the Maremma, the noxious vapors of which he was confident would do the trick; but she took so long to die that he grew impatient and had her thrown out of the window."

It is from Oliver Goldsmith's "An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog" in which a very good man is bitten by a mad dog. "The man recovered of the bite, The dog it was that died."