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Evelyn Waugh’s Decadent Redemption

Brideshead Revisited is one of the great English novels of the twentieth century. It is beloved, but it also provokes antipathy — as it always has. When Evelyn Waugh wrote the novel in 1945 many of his fellow writers reviled it. They, like so many secular contemporary readers, found its Catholicism bizarre, its breathless depiction...

An excellent reappraisal which appeared in the New Statesman in 2023 said Brideshead was “quite inexplicable to non-Catholics.” Even Jeffrey Manly of the Evelyn Waugh Society recommends crossing out the religious parts so you are left with a funny novel. The conjuring stuff of these things, “the Young Magician’s Compendium,” that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle. Everywhere, on cobble and gravel and lawn, the leaves were falling and in the college gardens the smoke of the bonfires joined the wet river mist, drifting across the grey walls; the flags were oily underfoot and as, one by one, the lamps were lit in the windows round the quad, the golden lights were diffuse and remote, like those of a foreign village seen from the slopes outside; new figures in new gowns wandered through the twilight under the arches and the familiar bells now spoke of a year’s memories.

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