![]() Brideshead’s narrator and protagonist is Charles Ryder, a painter. ![]() It was, he said later, “an attempt to trace the workings of the divine purpose in a pagan world, in the lives of an English Catholic family, half-paganized themselves, in the world of 1923–1939.”įor the few Commonweal readers unfamiliar with the novel, a brief synopsis may be in order. The scope of more than a decade, the heightened style, and the complex structure would all stretch his powers and produce what early on he called his magnum opus. ![]() When he sat down to begin work on Brideshead Revisited in February, 1944, he was aware that this would be his most ambitious novel. Evelyn Waugh cultivated a reputation for being cantankerous-he once listed some provocations as “cooking and theology and clothes and grammar and dogs”-so it is surprising to discover that he kept his equanimity about responses to various stages of the composition and reception of Brideshead Revisited, his best-known and most profitable novel and the one in which he seems to have had the greatest emotional and artistic investment. ![]()
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