Brideshead Revisited Summary: Waugh's Novel of Faith, Class and Lost Youth
What it is about
Published in 1945, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is Evelyn Waugh's account of one man's long entanglement with a single family. The narrator is Charles Ryder. The family is the Flytes, wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial country house in Wiltshire called Brideshead Castle. The story runs from the 1920s to the early 1940s.
The structure matters. A prologue set in the last years of the Second World War finds Charles, now an army officer, posted with his battalion to a country estate. It is Brideshead. The place sets off his memories, and the novel's three parts are what he remembers.
The first part, "Et In Arcadia Ego", begins in 1923. Charles is an undergraduate reading history at Oxford, at a college closely modelled on Hertford. He is befriended by Lord Sebastian Flyte, younger son of the Marquess of Marchmain and a student at Christ Church. Both men had come up in the autumn of 1922, Charles shortly before his nineteenth birthday. Sebastian draws him into a circle of eccentric friends, including the aesthete Anthony Blanche, and then takes him home to Brideshead, where Charles meets Sebastian's sister, Lady Julia. A summer holiday in that house gives the section its golden, pastoral quality.
The second part, "Brideshead Deserted", is the unravelling. Sebastian's drinking becomes impossible to ignore, and the family's efforts to control it make matters worse. Charles falls out with Lady Marchmain and leaves the house believing he will not return. Julia marries Rex Mottram, a rich Canadian-born businessman and politician whose status as a divorcé with a living ex-wife causes her mother real grief. Sebastian drifts abroad over two years and ends up in North Africa.
The third part, "A Twitch Upon the Thread", picks Charles up years later as a successful architectural painter, married with two children and unhappy. He and Julia, both in failing marriages, find each other again. What happens next turns on the Flyte family's religion rather than on their money.
The main characters
Charles Ryder narrates. He arrives at Oxford as a young man who has always believed Christianity to be "without substance or merit", and much of the book tracks what the Flytes do to that assumption. He lives in London with his widowed father, Edward Ryder, a comic creation in his own right. He later marries Celia, grows cold towards her, and finds she has been unfaithful.
Sebastian Flyte is the charming, teddy-bear-carrying undergraduate whose decline shapes the whole middle of the book. He flees to Morocco, ruins his health, and eventually finds a kind of peace as an under-porter and object of charity at a Catholic monastery in Tunisia.
Lady Julia Flyte is Sebastian's sister and, later, Charles's lover. Lady Marchmain is the devout mother, abandoned by her husband and all the more fixed on her faith. Lord Marchmain converted to Catholicism to marry her, then left both wife and religion and settled in Venice. The elder son, the Earl of Brideshead ("Bridey"), and the younger daughter, Lady Cordelia, share their mother's belief. Cordelia serves the wounded in the Spanish Civil War. Rex Mottram supplies the worldly contrast, a man who treats conversion as paperwork.
The themes
Catholicism sits at the centre. The Flytes talk and behave in ways Charles finds baffling, and faith is the thing that repeatedly overrides desire, convenience and love. The title of the third part, taken from a line about a fisherman's thread, is the clue: grace pulls people back whether they want it or not.
Class and nostalgia run alongside it. The novel mourns a passing English aristocracy, and the house itself is the symbol of that order. Charles paints Marchmain House in London before its demolition, which tells you where things are heading.
Then there is love and its instability. Charles's attachment to Sebastian and later to Julia are treated as part of the same long pursuit of something he cannot name. Identity is bound up in it, since Charles is an outsider who borrows the glamour of a family that is already breaking.
How it ends
Charles and Julia plan to divorce their spouses and marry. On the eve of the Second World War, the terminally ill Lord Marchmain returns to Brideshead to die. Appalled by Bridey's marriage to a middle-class widow past childbearing age, he names Julia his heir, which would in effect put the house within Charles's reach. Then Lord Marchmain accepts the Last Rites on his deathbed. Julia concludes she cannot enter a sinful marriage, and Charles himself is shaken by what he has witnessed. The epilogue, set in the early spring of 1943 or 1944, leaves him "homeless, childless, middle-aged and loveless", billeted at a Brideshead damaged by military use, with the private chapel on his mind.
Why it still matters
It is the Waugh novel that people who know nothing else of Waugh still know. The Granada television miniseries of 1981, in eleven parts, was very well received and fixed the Oxford scenes in popular memory, and a film adaptation followed in 2008. Readers come for the summer idyll and the comedy, then find a book arguing seriously about belief. It suits anyone drawn to English country-house fiction, to stories of youth recalled from middle age, or to novels where religion is a plot engine rather than decoration.
