book1945

Brideshead Revisited

Disciplines:

Summary

Evelyn Waugh's novel of a middle-class narrator's fascination with an aristocratic Catholic family — and the 'twitch upon the thread' of divine grace that pulls them all, including the narrator, toward God.

Core Contribution

One of the great Catholic novels in English — depicting grace as the hook that cannot be shaken, even by those who try. Sebastian Flyte as the novel's tragic figure: brilliant, doomed, finally reduced to a doorkeeper at a Moroccan monastery. Charles Ryder's gradual conversion as the novel's arc. An elegy for the English Catholic aristocracy and for a pre-war England. Waugh considered it his best work.

Key Spikes & Highlights

Waugh wrote it in a few months in 1944 while on wartime leave — he called it 'a souvenir of the Second War' and later thought its prose 'inflatedly romantic' in a wartime note of nostalgia he could not sustain in peacetime.
The 1981 Granada TV adaptation (Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews) is widely considered the finest literary adaptation in British television history — and arguably made the novel more famous than the novel itself.

Historical Influences

Henry James Ronald Firbank

Intellectual Lineage

English Novel Catholic Literature

Allied Works

Decline and Fall A Handful of Dust Sword of Honour trilogy

Contemporaries & Peers

A Handful of Dust The Power and the Glory

Minds Influenced

English Catholic Fiction

Intellectual Posterity

Catholic Fiction English Novel Tradition

Discussing