Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
In Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel, the glittering world of the British aristocracy is seen through the eyes of Charles Ryder, enthralled with his decadent Oxford schoolmate Sebastian Flyte. At Brideshead, Sebastian’s grand country estate, Charles is drawn into the doomed life of privilege of the Marchmains and their four eccentric children.
While enchanted by the magnificence of Brideshead and the artistic, outlandish ways of the Marchmain family, Charles—a lonely student of no class distinction—soon sees how the aristocratic elite cannot keep pace with Britain’s changing society after World War I. At once perplexed and repulsed by the Marchmains’ torturous relationship with Roman Catholicism, Charles witnesses the strains that faith and family place on Sebastian, devolving before his eyes from a debauched rabble-rouser to a dissolute alcoholic. And Sebastian’s enigmatic and beautiful sister Julia will confound Charles most of all.
In Brideshead Revisited, Waugh sets aside his famed satirical voice and reveals his capacity as a writer of most profound feeling and emotional insight. Written during Waugh’s service in World War II and told from Charles’s nostalgic perspective as a middle aged army captain, Brideshead Revisited is an elegy to a lost world and the passing of youth. Reflecting on the notions of sin and judgment, guilt and punishment, and grace and mercy, the novel is also a fascinating testimony to the experience of English Catholics as a religious minority, as well as the subtleties of class and the curious sexual norms of the British university system in the time between world wars.
At once romantic, comic, and tragic, Brideshead Revisited is perhaps Waugh’s best loved work as well as his most lyrical.
“Lush and evocative... the one Waugh which best expresses at once the profundity of change and the indomitable endurance of the human spirit.”
The Times
In 2005, Brideshead Revisited was chosen by Time magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present. Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon starred in the film adaptation of Brideshead Revisted released in Fall 2008. The much acclaimed 1981 British television miniseries of Brideshead Revisited starred Jeremy Irons.