Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, satirical novel by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1945. An acclaimed TV miniseries of the same name, starring Jeremy Irons, Anthony Andrews, and Diana Quick, was based on the novel in 1981.

According to Waugh, a convert to Roman Catholicism, the novel was intended to show “the operation of divine grace” in the affairs of a particular group of people. This is revealed through the story of a wealthy Roman Catholic family as told by Charles Ryder, a friend of the family. Despite the seeming indifference to, or outright repudiation of, the church by various members of the Flyte family—particularly the imperious Lord Marchmain, who lives in Italy with his mistress; his daughter Julia; and his son Sebastian—by the end of the novel each has shown some sign of acceptance of the faith.

Arguably Evelyn Waugh’s best novel, certainly his most famous, and an immediate bestseller. Brideshead Revisited follows the aristocratic Flyte family from the 1920s through to the Second World War. The novel is subtitled “The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder,” and the narrator first meets Sebastian, an aesthete, at Oxford University. The two form an intense friendship. Charles is a serious, earnest student, but there is a tension between the scholasticism of his undergraduate pursuits and his artistic ambitions. His friendship with Sebastian enables him to loosen his grip on the conventional values that had until then structured his life, and the pair’s decadent lifestyle encourages Charles’s artistic development. During their breaks from Oxford, they spend time together at Brideshead Castle, the home of the Flyte family, and Charles comes to realize that Sebastian’s faith is one that he cannot always understand: to him it seems naive and inconsistent.

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Sebastian is a discontented seeker, and he describes his parents in scathing terms: “Mummy is popularly believed to be a saint and Papa is excommunicated—and I wouldn’t know which of them was happy. Anyway, however you look at it, happiness doesn’t seem to have much to do with it, and that’s all I want.” A means of escape, Sebastian’s continual heavy drinking increasingly drives a wedge between him and Charles; however, Charles’s relationship with the Flyte family overall remains strong. Years later, after they have both married unhappily, Charles, now a fairly well-known artist, falls in love with Sebastian’s sister, Julia. But Julia’s newly strong Catholic beliefs eventually become insurmountable to a continuing relationship.

Waugh had converted to Catholicism himself in 1930, and in many ways Brideshead Revisited can be seen as a public expression of his own belief, and an exposition of divine grace. He even joined the British Army, in his late thirties, in order to gain the experience he believed he needed in order to write about military life. Previously known as a writer of comic satires that often pilloried the upper class, Waugh returned from service in World War II with newfound seriousness, and Brideshead Revisited was the result. Within the novel he explores a complex interdependency of relationships and, in particular, the overarching importance of religious faith, which, although not always prominent, ultimately prevails.