From this first introduction, Sebastian’s family enter the fray: his father, the societally exiled Lord Marchmain his mother, the sanctimonious Lady Marchmain his brother, the diacritic ‘Bridey’ and his sisters, the beautiful Julia and analytical Cordelia. It is here that Charles first encounters Sebastian, met in the most peculiar of circumstances: when the latter vomits on Charles’ carpet through an open window. It is precisely this prodigious critical approval that makes this reader’s disappointment in the novel more unfortunate.īrideshead Revisited is a novel of nostalgia as General Charles Ryder reminisces in 1943 about his time at Brideshead and his friendship with Sebastian Flyte: “…though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest,” (17) Charles remarks before the narrative reverts to 1923, to Oxford, a place of “autumnal mists, …grey springtime, and the rare glory of…summer days…when the chestnut was in flower and the bells rang out high and clear…” (17).
Written between December 1943 and June 1944 following a parachuting accident, Evelyn Waugh’s “operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters” (so described in the novel’s preface) has received significant acclaim: Time magazine in 2005 heralded it as one of the hundred best post-1923 novels of the English language Newsweek awarded it a position as one of the greatest hundred books of world literature and the novel was adapted into a widely-lauded television serialisation starring Jeremy Irons and Laurence Olivier in 1981.
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