Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead - Hardcover

Byrne, Paula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060881305 ISBN 13: 9780060881306

Publisher: Harper, 2010

Synopsis

A terrifically engaging and original biography of one of England’s greatest novelists, Evelyn Waugh, and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched, and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited. Fans of The Mitfords, D.J. Taylor’s Bright Young People, and Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons, as well as Anglophiles in general, will find much to savor in Paula Byrne’s wonderful Mad World.

About this title

About the Author

Paula Byrne is the critically acclaimed author of five biographies, including Belle: The Slave Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice, The Real Jane Austen, and Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead. She lives in Oxford, England, with her husband, the academic and biographer Jonathan Bate.

From the Back Cover

Evelyn Waugh was already famous when Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945. Written at the height of the war, the novel was, he admitted, of no "immediate propaganda value." Instead, it was the story of a household, a family and a journey of religious faith—an elegy for a vanishing world and a testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier.

The Lygons of Madresfield were every bit as glamourous, eccentric and compelling as their counterparts in Brideshead Revisited. William Lygon, Earl Beauchamp, was a warmhearted, generous and unconventional father whose seven children adored him. When he was forced to flee the country by his scheming brother-in-law, his traumatised children stood firmly by him, defying not only the mores of the day but also their deeply religious mother.

In this engrossing biography, Paula Byrne takes an innovative approach to her subject, setting out to capture Waugh through the friendships that mattered most to him. She uncovers a man who, far from the snobbish misanthrope of popular caricature, was as loving and as complex as the family that inspired him. This brilliantly original biography unlocks for the first time the extent to which Waugh's great novel encoded and transformed his own experiences. In so doing, it illuminates the loves and obsessions that shaped his life, and brings us inevitably to the secret that dared not speak its name.

Reviews

As much as this is a biography of Evelyn Waugh, it is also the biography of the family that inspired his best-known novel, Brideshead Revisited. The product of a middle-class upbringing and a middling public school, Waugh’s experience at Oxford was an awakening. There, he fell in with a sophisticated crowd that had at its center the glamorous Hugh Lygon, second son in an aristocratic Catholic family. Scandal-ridden as well, the eminent patriarch, Lord Beauchamp, was forced to leave the country because of homosexual activities. Waugh became close friends with several of Hugh’s sisters, whose doings seemed to exemplify the spirit of the age. Their splendid house Madresfield Court—called Mad for short—offered the template for Brideshead, just as Hugh provided the model for Sebastian Flyte. Readers don’t necessarily need to be conversant with Waugh’s novels in order to enjoy this well-researched and absorbing account, but those who are will be fascinated by Byrne’s exploration of how Waugh used elements from his own life to shape his work. Expect requests for Brideshead Revisited from patrons who get their hands on this. --Mary Ellen Quinn

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060881305
• ISBN 13: 9780060881306
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384