There, Waugh neglected academic work and was known as much for his artwork as for his writing. This circumstance would rankle with the status-conscious Evelyn for the rest of his life but may have contributed to his interest in religion, even though at Lancing he lost his childhood faith and became an agnostic.Īfter Lancing, he attended Hertford College, Oxford as a history scholar. Sherborne therefore refused to take Evelyn and his father sent him to Lancing College, a school of lesser social prestige with a strong High Church Anglican character. Both Arthur and Alec had been educated at Sherborne, an English public school, but Alec had been asked to leave early during his final year after publishing a controversial novel, The Loom of Youth, based on the homosexual relationships in his school life. His only sibling was his older brother Alec, who also became a writer.

( From the publisher.)Įvelyn Waugh (pronounced Woh) was born in London, the second son of noted editor and publisher Arthur Waugh, He was brought up in upper middle class circumstances in the wealthy London suburb of Hampstead, where he attended Heath Mount School. Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the world of Waugh’s own youth, but it is also a story about religious and secular love, about the notions of sin and judgment, guilt and punishment and how, almost unaccountably, they can give shape to one’s life.īy turns romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh’s familiar satiric exploration of English society and mores, revealing an elegiac, lyrical writer of the most lucid and profound feeling. The novel Waugh thought of as his magnum opus, it is the story of the intense entanglement of a young, middle-class Englishman, Charles Ryder, with a wealthy, eccentric Anglo-Catholic family, the Marchmains: in particular, with Sebastian, the flamboyant young man Charles meets at Oxford in the 1920s and Sebastian’s sister Julia, who will become the great and unrequited love of Charles’s life. Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles RyderĮvelyn Waugh’s most celebrated novel is a memory drama of extraordinary richness and depth.

Evelyn waugh the loved one summary