Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Evelyn Waugh
-
Standard Name: Waugh, Evelyn
Birth Name: Evelyn Arthur St John Waugh
EW
was a twentieth-century novelist whose startling black humour goes together with devastating satire and a low estimate of unredeemed human nature (whether he is fictionalizing the failings of other people or of himself). He is remembered not only for his novels but for his prolific journalism, travel writing, biography and autobiography, and for his posthumously published letters and diaries. His resolutely unmodernised Catholicism
and his Toryism
(more social and romantic than political) were not always beneficial to his work and until well after his death inflicted serious damage to his literary reputation, making him a bugbear to a generally liberal intellectual establishment.
It was during her debutante period that NM
met Evelyn Waugh
, who became her lifelong friend, correspondent, and literary mentor.
Literary responses
Nancy Mitford
The Blessing did not do so well as its two predecessors; Antonia Fraser
feels that it marked a decline in fictional achievement.
Fraser, Antonia. “A Most Superior Street”. Spectator.co.uk. Champagne for the brain.
NM
wrote that My Blessing has had the most awful reviews you ever...
Publishing
Nancy Mitford
The essay was provoked by a scholarly article, Upper Class English Usage, published in an academic journal in 1954 by Professor Alan Ross
. The terms U, for upper-class, and Non-U, for...
Textual Production
Nancy Mitford
Describing NM
's letters as an essential part of her artistic output,
Mitford, Nancy. “Critical Materials”. Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford, edited by Charlotte Mosley, Hodder and Stoughton, p. various pages.
vii
her niece Charlotte Mosley
has edited two collections: Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford, 1993, and The Letters of...
Leisure and Society
Margaret Haig, Viscountess Rhondda
After her schooling at St Leonard's
and before her brief time at Oxford
, Margaret Haig Thomas (later MHVR
) was a debutante for three years, during which time she was bored and suffocated by...
Textual Features
Olivia Manning
The first trilogy draws on OM
's experience of the early years of the Second World War in eastern Europe. In both trilogies, British national concerns are disconcertingly filtered through people whose priorities and loyalties...
Textual Production
Rose Macaulay
Over the years, RM
published several dozen literary articles in a wide range of magazines, newspapers, and commemorative volumes. She wrote on past and contemporary literary figures, including Leslie Stephen
, Stella Benson
, Rebecca West
Performance of text
Bryony Lavery
A rather different stage adaptation by BL
, of Evelyn Waugh
's Brideshead Revisited, opened as the inaugural production at the newly redeveloped Theatre Royal in York, before going on tour.
Hickling, Alfred. “Brideshead Revisited review—Waugh’s charming men hit the stage in style”. theguardian.com.
Author summary
Elizabeth Jolley
EJ
, writing in the later twentieth century, was called the most comical and disturbing writer working in Australia today.
Bird, Delys, and Brenda Walker, editors. Elizabeth Jolley: New Critical Essays. Angus and Robertson.
back-cover
The author of some fifteen novels as well as plays, poetry, and short stories...
Reception
Elizabeth Jenkins
The book received some appreciative reviews, but there were others which argued that EJ
was culpable in her use of real events which were so traceable. The Time and Tide notice (by a reviewer whom...
Intertextuality and Influence
P. D. James
PDJ
followed the English tradition of detective-story writing that has continued from the 1920s and 1930s, a genre in which many women have held dominant positions. She spoke of her adolescent reading as influenced in...
Occupation
Elizabeth Jane Howard
EJH
also free-lanced in journalism and on television. She appeared on discussion programmes about books (which were more plentiful in those days) and was also asked to appear on the political programme Table Talk...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Jane Howard
Arthur Koestler
described this, before publication, as a cross between Nancy Mitford
and Evelyn Waugh
. When EJH
told him she was having trouble finishing it, he said she had finished it, and written beyond...
Textual Production
Winifred Holtby
WH
's inspiration for the novel came from reports of the coronation of the Emperor of Abyssinia
in 1930.
Shaw, Marion, and Winifred Holtby. “Introduction”. Mandoa, Mandoa!, Virago, p. ix - xix.
xi-xii
Evelyn Waugh
, who was present at the coronation, based his novel Black Mischief on...
Literary responses
Nina Hamnett
Rebecca West
was not charmed: her review likened NH
to a character in Evelyn Waugh
's Vile Bodies and commented on the book's idiot gusto curiously combined with a strong suicidal impulse.
Booth-Clibborn, Edward, and Nina Hamnett. “Introduction”. Laughing Torso, Virago, p. v - x.