Brideshead Revisited

A Novel Written in Wartime, Set in Paradise

Evelyn Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited in 1944 on six weeks of wartime leave, in a wartime England of rationing and rubble. The contrast between the circumstances of composition and the world being described — Oxford in the 1920s, the great house of Brideshead with its fountain and its gilded chapel, Venice in summer — gives the novel its characteristic emotional register: elegy. Waugh was not describing a world he expected to survive the war. He was preserving it.

Charles Ryder, an army captain billeted in a commandeered country house, recognizes in its architecture the house where he was happy as a young man. What follows is an act of extended memory: Charles’s friendship at Oxford with Lord Sebastian Flyte, a beautiful, charming Catholic aristocrat carrying a teddy bear named Aloysius and a relationship with his faith that is simultaneously ardent and agonized; his years in the social world the Flyte family inhabits; his eventual love affair with Sebastian’s sister Julia, and the theological crisis that ends it. Brideshead itself — the house, its chapel, the family that it belongs to — is not merely setting but protagonist.

Sebastian Flyte and the Literature of Lost Youth

Sebastian has, in the seventy years since the novel’s publication, become one of the defining fictional embodiments of a certain kind of English promise that destroys itself. Beautiful, generous, funny, and in flight from a faith he cannot outrun, he achieves his own ruin with the determination of someone who knows, at some level, that this is the only authentic response available to him. His alcoholism is not glamorized by Waugh — the later chapters that track his decline are written with clear eyes — but his early self, the Sebastian of Oxford punts and strawberries and wine, has entered the cultural memory as something close to ideal: youth at its most radiant, before the world gets in.

Charles’s love for Sebastian — passionate, aestheticized, never named — is one of the most carefully handled relationships in English fiction of the period. Waugh does not define it, and the ambiguity is not evasion but precision: Charles loves Sebastian the way one loves the incarnation of a world that one has never belonged to and will never quite leave.

Faith as the Novel’s Hidden Architecture

Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930, and Brideshead Revisited is, at its deepest level, a theological novel. Not a didactic one — Waugh was too good a novelist for that — but one in which the Catholic faith functions as the organizing principle of the Flyte family’s psychology and the novel’s resolution. The “twitch upon the thread,” as Sebastian’s mother puts it, is the Church’s claim on souls that try to escape it. Each Flyte, in their different way, is pulled back.

Modern secular readers sometimes resist this conclusion, finding the novel’s final turn toward faith aesthetically unsatisfying. But Waugh’s point is precisely that grace operates outside aesthetic categories — that the hook in the heart works regardless of whether the person who feels it finds it beautiful or convenient. The ending is not triumphant; it is quietly devastating, and all the more powerful for refusing consolation.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — One of the twentieth century’s great elegies, written in prose of aching beauty by a novelist working at the full height of his powers.

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The Television Adaptation and the Novel

The 1981 Granada Television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, with Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder and Anthony Andrews as Sebastian Flyte, brought the novel to a wider audience than it had reached since its publication in 1945, and introduced a generation to its particular combination of lush visual beauty, social elegance, and theological seriousness. The adaptation was eleven episodes long and covered the novel with unusual fidelity; the 2008 film, by contrast, compressed the narrative in ways that lost much of what makes the book distinctive. For readers who have seen the television version before encountering the novel, the experience of reading is one of depth rather than discovery: the novel is richer, stranger, and more intellectually demanding than any adaptation can be.

The Wartime Frame and Its Importance

The novel’s framing device — Charles Ryder’s regiment quartered at Brideshead at the novel’s opening and close — is not incidental but structural. Waugh wrote the book in 1944 on wartime leave, and the wartime frame gives the entire retrospective narrative its emotional meaning: Charles is not simply remembering his past but apprehending it, from the vantage of a world being destroyed, as something that had a value he did not fully understand while it was happening. The house, the family, the faith — all of these appear in memory as already lost, already elegiac, already in the past tense that the present will shortly confirm.

This double temporal structure — the remembering of things remembered — is what gives the novel its characteristic emotional quality: not quite nostalgia, because Waugh understood nostalgia as a falsification, but the more honest and more painful recognition that what is lost was genuinely valuable and is genuinely gone.

The Question of Waugh’s Catholicism

Waugh converted to Catholicism in 1930, and the conversion was intellectual and moral as well as emotional: he read the theology, he took instruction, and he remained committed to Catholic practice for the rest of his life. This context matters for reading Brideshead Revisited because the novel’s theological argument is not decorative but load-bearing. The Flyte family’s relationship to their faith — Sebastian’s flight from it and inability to escape it, Julia’s rationalized abandonment and eventual return, Lord Marchmain’s deathbed reception of the last rites — is not Waugh endorsing the Church’s social conservatism or its institutional history. It is Waugh arguing for something more difficult: that the claims of faith are real regardless of whether the person to whom they are made finds them convenient, beautiful, or morally coherent.

Charles Ryder, who is not Catholic at the novel’s opening, is by its close in a state that Waugh leaves carefully unnamed. He pauses before the tabernacle light in the chapel. The prayer he offers is brief and barely articulate. But the flame is burning in the darkness, and Waugh’s final image is of something that persists after everything else has been commandeered, dispersed, and apparently destroyed. The ending is not triumphant; it is quietly hopeful in the specific way that Catholic theology allows, and it asks of the reader a willingness to take that hope seriously that secular readings of the novel consistently underestimate.