Centennial Editions
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A 1946 Selection.
Centennial Editions
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
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About the author
Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead, England, in 1903, into a family of publishers and writers. He was educated at Lancing and Hertford College, Oxford, where he majored in journalism and modern history. Waugh’s first book, Rossetti: His Life and Works, was published in 1928. Soon afterward his first novel, Decline and Fall, appeared and his career was sensationally launched. Apart from his novels, Waugh also wrote several acclaimed travel books, two additional biographies, and an autobiography, A Little Learning. He died in 1966 in Combe Florey, United Kingdom.
Cultural history: 1946 to now
Brideshead Revisited was adapted into a hit television series in 1981. Famously provocative in its portrayal of homoerotic dynamics, the show was nevertheless a hit with US audiences and received widespread critical acclaim from major US publications. The Washington Post deemed it “the best series ever seen on American television,” and according to The New York Times, it “constituted the biggest British invasion since the Beatles.” The series laid the groundwork for future prestigious period dramas such as Downton Abbey.
The Anglophilia did not stop there: in New York City, Bloomingdale’s dedicated window displays to Brideshead Revisited-inspired fashion, and years later, the original teddy bear featured in the series sold at auction for £26,000.
Brideshead Revisited centers on the wealthy, enigmatic Flyte family as they reckon with their Catholic faith and come to terms with the declining relevance of the English aristocracy. Waugh uses the workings of divine grace in each of their lives to illuminate the redemptive power of faith and dismiss the hedonistic allure of 20th-century modernism.
Brideshead Revisited was informed by a broader cultural movement in which many British intellectuals, including Evelyn Waugh, converted to and wrote about Catholicism. Much of this shift resulted from an increased need to seek meaning and self-understanding after the despondency of the Second World War. Waugh famously wrote to a friend: “I always think to myself, ‘I know I am awful. But how much more awful I should be without the Faith.’”
Brideshead Revisited depicts a homoerotic bond between two main characters in the book, likely inspired by Evelyn Waugh’s sexual relationships with men throughout his university years at Oxford.
The novel is especially visionary when considered within the context of the punitive climate surrounding homosexuality in the mid-20th century. Sexual activity between men was not decriminalized in the United Kingdom until 1967, one year after Evelyn Waugh’s death; same-sex marriage would not be legalized in the UK for another forty-seven years.
Synopsis
The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece—a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire.
Through the story of Charles Ryder’s entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own y...
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Centennial Editions
