He also was aware of the audience he hoped to address, defining it in part by negation in saying that fewer than a half-dozen Americans would understand it and that, though the book was “steeped in theology,” even theologians might not recognize his intent. Waugh had quite definite ideas about the development of the complex plot.

Despite a succession of setbacks, the formidable Lady Marchmain, who will not consent to a divorce, is determined to preserve the faith of her mostly wayward family. Lord Marchmain, Sebastian and Julia’s father, is estranged from his fiercely Catholic wife, and lives abroad with his mistress. Much of the novel’s action takes place at Brideshead Castle, the Flytes’ majestic estate, and a symbol of a once admirable, but now fading, religious and aristocratic order. At Oxford, he meets and befriends the charismatic but troubled Sebastian Flyte, and eventually falls in love with Sebastian’s sister Julia. Ryder’s involvement with the aristocratic Flyte family, English Catholics, unfolds from Ryder’s years at Oxford to the Second World War. Brideshead’s narrator and protagonist is Charles Ryder, a painter. It was, he said later, “an attempt to trace the workings of the divine purpose in a pagan world, in the lives of an English Catholic family, half-paganized themselves, in the world of 1923–1939.”įor the few Commonweal readers unfamiliar with the novel, a brief synopsis may be in order. The scope of more than a decade, the heightened style, and the complex structure would all stretch his powers and produce what early on he called his magnum opus. When he sat down to begin work on Brideshead Revisited in February, 1944, he was aware that this would be his most ambitious novel.

Evelyn Waugh cultivated a reputation for being cantankerous-he once listed some provocations as “cooking and theology and clothes and grammar and dogs”-so it is surprising to discover that he kept his equanimity about responses to various stages of the composition and reception of Brideshead Revisited, his best-known and most profitable novel and the one in which he seems to have had the greatest emotional and artistic investment.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh