Evelyn Waugh, in this his most famous novel, shows his fascination by both the Catholic faith and the English aristocracy. It is narrated by the architectural painter Charles Ryder who befriends Sebastian Flyte at Oxford. Ryder himself is an agnostic, while the Flyte family are Catholic through and through. He goes to visit them all at Brideshead to familiarise himself with everyone, though not the absent father, Lord Marchmain, who lives in Italy with his mistress. Sebastian is handsome, flamboyant, homosexual and an alcoholic. Lady Marchmain enlists Ryder’s help to row back her son’s excesses, while Ryder himself later falls in love with Sebastian’s sister, Julia, who is unhappily married. A central theme of the book is Ryder’s attempts to understand the Catholic faith as lived by this eccentric family. All his life he has been an outsider, first in his childhood with an emotionally distant father and then at Oxford where he hooked up with wild young men like Sebastian Flyte.
This book is thought to be largely autobiographical. Its theme is described by Waugh as ‘the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters’. In many ways it is an unhappy tension between the profoundly secular world and the spiritual one promoted by Catholicism.
Evelyn Waugh was born in London in 1903, was educated at Oxford and died in 1966. He married in 1928, divorced two years later and was received into the Catholic Church. This book is thought to be largely autobiographical and had the working title of ‘The Household of Faith’. The author ornately calls its theme ‘the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters’.