Ever since I first read Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited as a master’s students many years ago, I have been smitten. Literary trends and fashions come and go, but I still return to Brideshead every couple of years for sheer reading pleasure.
Undoubtedly Waugh’s most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited was first published in 1945 after the second world war. Its narrative is deeply imbued with nostalgia for an unspoilt, quasi-mythical rural England of stately homes and bright young upper-class people that, it can be argued, never really existed in the first place.
Waugh’s protagonist is Charles Ryder, a young middle-class man with social aspirations, whio meets and befriends the upper-class Sebastian Flyte while at Oxford. Ryder is seduced by the easy charm and carefree attitude of Sebastian, an infatuation that only increases once Ryder accompanies Sebastian to his ancestral home, Brideshead, and meets his family.
