Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Evelyn Waugh
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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.
A review by Evelyn Waugh
suggested that GBS
was better at thrillers than at those tiresome old family chronicles, the Rakonitzes and so forth. She herself pronounced this book not a bad thriller.
Stern, G. B. . And did he stop and speak to you?. Henry Regnery.
123
Literary responses
Dorothy Whipple
DW
's mother and siblings cried over the text of her childhood autobiography, remembering old days.
Whipple, Dorothy. Random Commentary. Michael Joseph.
71
J. C. Squire
praised the book in the Daily Telegraph and Evelyn Waugh
in The Spectator wrote that...
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...
Literary responses
Stella Gibbons
Cold Comfort Farm quickly became a critical and popular success, dispelling the fears of Longmans
(SG
's publisher) that it was too eccentric to sell. When Longmans was left in ruins by bombing at...
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.
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...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Siddal
The poems attracted little attention initially, except for their connection to ES
's life. Swinburne
was unusual in his estimation of her as a veritable artist in her own right. He discerned in A Year...
Literary responses
Sybille Bedford
Nancy Mitford
called A Legacyone of the very best novels I've ever read.
Bedford, Sybille. Jigsaw. Penguin.
prelims
Evelyn Waugh
called it entirely delicious . . . cool . . . elegant.
Dirda, Michael. “Sips from the finest vintage”. Guardian Weekly, p. 25.
25
Reviewing a reprint for the...
Literary responses
Edith Sitwell
This book was very much admired by Evelyn Waugh
, who felt that ES
had seen deep into Swift's tortured soul.
sang its praises, and guessed it would be attributed to...
Literary responses
Muriel Spark
This novel was chosen a Book Society
recommendation (of which between six and ten were selected per month); it was not the choice of the month, since the panel felt it was too morbid—deeply...
Literary responses
Muriel Spark
Penelope Gilliatt
thought the evil in Seton had been to some extent absorbed by Bridges.
Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark. The Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
237
Evelyn Waugh
pronounced this the cleverest and most elegant of all Mrs Spark's clever and elegant books.
Spark, Muriel. Robinson. Penguin.
last page
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Antonia Fraser
Jemima (a graduate of Cambridge) here visits Oxford
, with which her relationship is complicated by fact that she is to do a documentary on the minority of upper-crust, over-privileged students recently highlighted in the...
Intertextuality and Influence
J. K. Rowling
Robert Galbraith has his own website, which details his military background and his work first for the military police and then in private security. He says his flamboyant, unusual mother came from Cornwall and went...
