Brideshead Revisited

OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR

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NON-FICTION

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Brideshead Revisited

EVELYN WAUGH

All rights reserved.

This title is in the public domain in Canada and is not subject to any license or copyright.

Cover design: Leah Springate

Cover image: (wallpaper) © DrObjektiff / Shutterstock

ISBN: 9780735252950

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

v4.1

a

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Prologue: Brideshead Revisited

Book One: Et in Arcadia ego

Chapter One: I meet Sebastian Flyte – and Anthony Blanche – I visit Brideshead for the first time

Chapter Two: My cousin Jasper’s Grand Remonstrance – a warning against charm – Sunday morning in Oxford

Chapter Three: My father at home – Lady Julia Flyte

Chapter Four: Sebastian at home – Lord Marchmain abroad

Chapter Five: Autumn in Oxford – dinner with Rex Mottram and supper with Boy Mulcaster – Mr Samgrass – Lady Marchmain at home – Sebastian contra mundum

Book Two: Brideshead Deserted

Chapter One: Samgrass revealed – I take leave of Brideshead – Rex revealed

Chapter Two: Julia and Rex

Chapter Three: Mulcaster and I in defence of our country – Sebastian abroad – I take leave of Marchmain House

Book Three: A Twitch Upon the Thread

Chapter One: Orphans of the Storm

Chapter Two: Private view – Rex Mottram at home

Chapter Three: The fountain

Chapter Four: Sebastian contra mundum

Chapter Five: Lord Marchmain at home – death in the Chinese drawing-room – the purpose revealed

Epilogue: Brideshead Revisited

To Laura

PREFACE

This novel, which is here re-issued with many small additions and some substantial cuts, lost me such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers. Its theme – the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters – was perhaps presumptuously large, but I make no apology for it. I am less happy about its form, whose more glaring defects may be blamed on the circumstances in which it was written.

In December 1943 I had the good fortune when parachuting to incur a minor injury which afforded me a rest from military service. This was extended by a sympathetic commanding officer, who let me remain unemployed until June 1944 when the book was finished. I wrote with a zest that was quite strange to me and also with impatience to get back to the war. It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster – the period of soya beans and Basic English – and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful. I have modified the grosser passages but have not obliterated them because they are an essential part of the book.