Maugham exposes the misguided social snobbery levelled at the character Rosie Driffield, whose frankness, honesty, and sexual freedom make her a target of conservative opprobrium.

"[1] In his introduction to a Modern Library edition, published in 1950, Maugham wrote, "I am willing enough to agree with common opinion that Of Human Bondage is my best work ...

The narrator, a well-to-do author named William Ashenden, is unexpectedly contacted by Alroy Kear, a moderately talented London writer who has been asked to write a biography of the famous, recently deceased novelist Edward Driffield by Amy, his second wife.

Amy, a nurse to the ailing Edward after his first wife left him, is known for her propriety, and her interest in augmenting and cementing her husband's literary reputation.

Cakes and Ale was first published in serialised form in four issues of Harper's Bazaar (February, March, April, and June 1930).

Two of the novel's principal characters, Alroy Kear and Edward Driffield, were widely interpreted by contemporaneous readers as thinly veiled and unflattering characterizations of, respectively, the novelists Hugh Walpole and Thomas Hardy (who had died two years previously).

[5] In The Fine Art of Literary Mayhem, Myrick Land asserts that Cakes and Ale ruined the last 11 years of Walpole's life and destroyed his reputation as a writer.

"[7] However, in his Modern Library introduction, Maugham said, "the model for what I consider the most engaging heroine I have ever created could never have recognized herself in my novel, since by the time I wrote it [in 1929] she was dead.