The Painted Veil is a 1925 novel by British author W. Somerset Maugham. The title is taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet which begins "Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life". The biographer Richard Cordell notes that the book was influenced by Maugham's study of science and his work as a houseman at St Thomas' Hospital. The novel was first published in serialised form in five issues of Cosmopolitan (November 1924 – March 1925). Beginning in May 1925, it was serialised…