Decline and Fall (1928)
Debut novel: Paul Pennyfeather is sent down from Oxford and teaches at Llanabba Castle school in Wales
Literature · Novelists
Evelyn Waugh
1903–1966 · English
Satirical fiction; Catholic novel
Evelyn Waugh was the sharpest English comic novelist of the interwar years, skewering the Bright Young Things in Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies and Fleet Street in Scoop. After converting to Roman Catholicism in 1930 his work grew more elegiac, culminating in Brideshead Revisited and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour.
How to spot them
- ▸Bright Young Things; Paul Pennyfeather; Lord Copper and William Boot of the Daily Beast
- ▸Brideshead Castle, Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte and his teddy bear Aloysius
- ▸Catholic convert and satirist; father of the journalist Auberon Waugh
- ▸Tony Last forced to read Dickens aloud in the Brazilian jungle (A Handful of Dust)
Key works
Vile Bodies (1930)
Satire of the Bright Young Things of 1920s London; filmed by Stephen Fry as Bright Young Things (2003)
A Handful of Dust (1934)
Tony Last's marriage collapses and he ends up the prisoner of Mr Todd in the Amazon, reading Dickens aloud
Scoop (1938)
Nature writer William Boot is mistakenly sent by Lord Copper's Daily Beast to cover a war in Ishmaelia
Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Charles Ryder recalls the aristocratic Catholic Flyte family, especially Sebastian and Julia
The Loved One (1948)
Satire of the Hollywood funeral industry, set around the Whispering Glades cemetery
Sword of Honour trilogy (1952–1961)
Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, following Guy Crouchback through the Second World War
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957)
Semi-autobiographical account of a middle-aged novelist's hallucinations on a sea voyage
Key ideas
- Moved from brittle, amoral comedy in the 1920s and 30s to a Catholic vision of grace, most explicitly in Brideshead Revisited
- Scoop remains the classic satire of foreign war correspondents and press barons
- Sword of Honour is often counted among the finest British novels of the Second World War
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Hampstead, London; educated at Lancing College and Hertford College, Oxford
- •His first wife was also called Evelyn (Evelyn Gardner), so friends called them 'He-Evelyn' and 'She-Evelyn'
- •Received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1930
- •His elder brother Alec Waugh wrote the school novel The Loom of Youth
- •While a schoolmaster in Wales he tried to drown himself but turned back after being stung by jellyfish, as told in his autobiography A Little Learning
- •Served in the Royal Marines and commandos in the war, including a mission to Yugoslavia with Randolph Churchill
- •Declined a CBE in 1959
- •Died on Easter Sunday 1966 at his home at Combe Florey, Somerset
- •Granada Television's 1981 Brideshead Revisited starred Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder
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Sources
- Philip Eade — Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited
- Evelyn Waugh — A Little Learning