Brideshead Revisited

The book includes two works by Evelyn Waugh—an outstanding British writer, novelist, journalist, essayist, biographer, and critic—one of the finest stylists in English prose of the twentieth century.

In the novel “Brideshead Revisited” (1945), Charles Ryder—the successful painter—is the narrator. The story tells the life of the aristocratic Marchmain family, closely connected with the narrator’s youth, and to whose family estate, years later, he is drawn back by happenstance.
Known as a master of black humor and sharp, witty satire, Evelyn Waugh wrote an unexpectedly lyrical, nostalgic, confessional book—endowing the main character with many autobiographical traits: memories of a joyful time studying at Oxford, a passion for drawing, love for old architecture and the patriarchal way of life in English estates, contempt for the arrogance and complacent foolishness of the nouveau riche, and a complex conflict between personal feelings and Catholic beliefs.