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Brideshead Revisited

Name: Brideshead Revisited
Author: Evelyn Waugh
ISBN: 9780316216456

by Evelyn Waugh

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Overview

About the Author

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was born into a publishing family in Hampstead, England, and educated at Oxford. After a brief stint as a schoolmaster, he turned to writing. His biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti appeared in 1928, but it was his sensational first novel, Decline and Fall, published the same year, that set the course for his career. Waugh wrote sixteen novels, including The Loved One, Scoop, and Brideshead Revisited.

Evelyn Waugh's best-loved novel and the basis for the PBS television production, Brideshead Revisited, the epic story of a great Catholic family in a doomed aristocratic age.

About the Author, Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), whom Time called "one of the century's great masters of English prose," wrote several widely acclaimed novels as well as volumes of biography, memoir, travel writing, and journalism. Three of his novels, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, and Brideshead Revisited, were selected by the Modern Library as among the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.

Biography

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) was born in Hampstead, England, into a family of publishers and writers. He was educated at Lancing and at Hertford College, Oxford, where he majored in modern history.

Waugh's first book, A Life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was published in 1928. Soon afterward his first novel, Decline and Fall, appeared and his career was sensationally launched. In fifteen novels of cunning construction and lapidary eloquence, Time summarized later, Evelyn Waugh developed a wickedly hilarious yet fundamentally religious assault on a century that, in his opinion, had ripped up the nourishing taproot of tradition and let wither all the dear things of the world. Apart from his novels, Waugh also wrote several acclaimed travel books, two additional biographies, and an autobiography, A Little Learning.

Author biography courtesy of Time Warner.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

In this classic tale of British life between the World Wars, Waugh parts company with the satire of his earlier works to examine affairs of the heart. Charles Ryder finds himself stationed at Brideshead, the family seat of Lord and Lady Marchmain. Exhausted by the war, he takes refuge in recalling his time spent with the heirs to the estate before the war--years spent enthralled by the beautiful but dissolute Sebastian and later in a more conventional relationship with Sebastian's sister Julia. Ryder portrays a family divided by an uncertain investment in Roman Catholicism and by their confusion over where the elite fit in the modern world. Although Waugh was considered by many to be more successful as a comic than as a wistful commentator on human relationships and faith, this novel was made famous by a 1981 BBC TV dramatization. Irons's portrayal of Ryder catapulted Irons to stardom, and in this superb reading his subtle, complete characterizations highlight Waugh's ear for the aristocratic mores of the time. Fervent Anglophiles will be thrilled by this excellent rendition of a favorite; Irons's reading saves this dinosaur from being suffocated by its own weight. (Dec. 2000) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

John K. Hutchens

"My theme," says the narrator in Evelyn Waugh's latest, his most carefully written and deeply felt novel, " is memory, that winged host.' It has an almost romantic sense of wonder, together with the provocative, personal point of view of a writer who sees life realistically. The emotional tone and content of Brideshead Revisited are accordingly heightened beyond any Mr. Waugh has acheived before. Brideshead Revisted is Mr. Waugh' finest achievement.--Books of the Century; New York Times review, December 1945