Publisher edition artwork
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh · First published 1945
Oxford, wine, Catholicism and the slow extinction of an English family.
Essential
Moderate · Medium — around 400 pages
Why Read It?
The definitive English novel of nostalgia, faith and a house too large to keep.
What It's About
An army captain billeted at a requisitioned country house recalls his entanglement with the family who owned it.
Why It Matters
It fixed the visual and emotional vocabulary of English aristocratic decline for every book and film that followed.
The Review
Waugh called it his magnum opus and later found it overwritten; he was wrong twice. The first section — Oxford in the 1920s, strawberries and Château Peyraguey under an elm — is the most seductive account of privileged youth in English, and it is deliberately followed by two hundred pages of consequences.
The novel is genuinely about grace, which most readers resist and most adaptations ignore. Read it for Sebastian and stay for Lord Marchmain's last scene.
Best Read
Autumn, over a long weekend, with claret.
Three Things You'll Take From It
- 01
Charm is not a moral quality and Waugh never pretends otherwise.
- 02
The house is the protagonist.
- 03
Nostalgia is treated as an affliction, not a virtue.
Better Read or Heard?
Jeremy Irons' narration is the obvious and correct choice.
If You Like This…
The Leopard — Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The Sicilian equivalent.
Find it on AmazonA Handful of Dust — Evelyn Waugh
Crueller, funnier, shorter.
Find it on Amazon
The Edition to Own
Penguin Modern Classics for reading; the Folio Society edition for the shelf. Take the revised 1960 text.
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