Kitty Fane, a young wife of bacteriologist Walter Fane finds herself in a world where her former life as a debutante in upper-middle class England isn’t sufficient. In a land where the cholera epidemic runs rampant and children are orphaned by the disease. W Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil , follows her story, as a young wife who is caught in an affair with another man, betrayed by her lover, and is suddenly thrusted into a world filled with disease and death. What make’s Maugham’s novel interesting is that it isn’t about the affair but about the growth of the character who suddenly realizes that her life isn’t a closed world filled with parties and becoming the wife of a respectable man. Kitty’s growth within the novel is about how the world around her shapes who she becomes once she’s away from the life that she had known. The Church and the disease within the town made her realize that life wasn’t only ab...