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.

Connections

Connections Author name Sort descending Excerpt
Textual Production Lady Cynthia Asquith
LCA 's column for the Times and her articles elsewhere led naturally to further miscellaneous work for and about children. (Evelyn Waugh was mistaken in his unshakable belief that she was the true author...
Intertextuality and Influence Beryl Bainbridge
The married couple Colin Haycraft and Alice Thomas Ellis (herself a writer) both worked at Gerald Duckworth publishers, and met BB while she was working there as a clerk. They taught her to write properly...
Friends, Associates Sybille Bedford
Introduced to Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria by the South African poet Roy Campbell while at Sanary, the young SB became their intimate friend.
Bedford, Sybille. Quicksands. Counterpoint.
249-50
She was later embarrassed by her earlier admiration for...
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...
Friends, Associates Theodora Benson
TB enjoyed a wide circle of friends both literary and non-literary. The former included Rose Macaulay and Howard Spring . She met her future collaborator Betty Askwith (daughter of an old friend of her mother's)...
Travel Theodora Benson
Not long after this she and her friend Betty Askwith set out together for Greece (which Askwith wanted to visit) and Yugoslavia and Albania (which Benson wanted to visit). The tourist trade was not even...
Family and Intimate relationships Brigid Brophy
BB 's father, John Brophy , was born in Liverpool of Irish stock. In 1914 he lied about his age and enlisted; his mother got him out of the army once by revealing he was...
Friends, Associates Mary Butts
A party at MB 's flat at 43 Belsize Park Gardens in London was attended by Evelyn Waugh , G. B. Stern , and Rebecca West .
Blaser, Robin et al. “Afterword”. Imaginary Letters, Talonbooks, pp. 61-80.
65
Fictionalization Nancy Cunard
NC was cast as Iris March in Michael Arlen's The Green Hat, as Lucy Tantamount in Aldous Huxley 's Point Counter Point, as Baby Bucktrout in Wyndham Lewis 's The Roaring Queen...
Literary responses Elizabeth De la Pasture
Novelist Evelyn Waugh was an ardent admirer of this book after coming on a copy by chance in 1950. His children liked it as much as he did, and thirty years later one of them,...
Family and Intimate relationships E. M. Delafield
EMD 's mother, Elizabeth Lydia Rosabelle (Bonham) de la Pasture , was a popular and prolific novelist whose work was admired by writers as far-ranging as Ivy Compton-Burnett and Evelyn Waugh . She wrote to...
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...
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...
Friends, Associates Graham Greene
GG 's friends spanned the political spectrum. He was a friend of the famously Communist actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin , but also of powerful Conservatives like the Tory MP Victor Cazalet . Later in...
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.
v
Alan Clutton-Brock

Timeline

4 December 1931: The BBC announced the resignation of Hilda...

Writing climate item

4 December 1931

The BBC announced the resignation of Hilda Matheson , its director of talks, which she had actually submitted in October. This was the climax of a long-running struggle over a series of talks by Harold Nicolson

April 1946 : A fact-finding mission for Clement Attlee's...

National or international item

April 1946

A fact-finding mission for Clement Attlee 's Labour government visited Tanganyika (now Tanzania) to investigate the feasibility of a large-scale scheme for cultivating groundnuts (peanuts).
Wood, Alan. The Groundnut Affair. Bodley Head.

Texts

Waugh, Evelyn. A Handful of Dust. Chapman and Hall, 1934.
Waugh, Evelyn. A Little Learning. Chapman and Hall, 1964.
Waugh, Evelyn. Basil Seal Rides Again, or, The Rake’s Regress. Chapman and Hall, 1963.
Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief. Chapman and Hall, 1932.
Waugh, Evelyn. Black Mischief. Little, Brown and Company, 1946.
Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. Chapman and Hall, 1945.
Mitford, Nancy, and Evelyn Waugh. “Critical Materials”. The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, edited by Charlotte Mosley, Hodder and Stoughton, 1996, p. various pages.
Waugh, Evelyn. Decline and Fall. Chapman, 1928.
Waugh, Evelyn. Helena. Chapman and Hall, 1950.
Waugh, Evelyn. Men at Arms. Chapman and Hall, 1952.
Waugh, Evelyn. Officers and Gentlemen. Chapman and Hall, 1955.
Waugh, Evelyn. Officers and Gentlemen. Little, Brown and Company, 1955.
Waugh, Evelyn. “Preface”. Brideshead Revisited, Chapman and Hall, 1960, pp. 9-10.
Waugh, Evelyn. “Preface”. Black Mischief, Chapman and Hall, 1962, p. 10.
Waugh, Evelyn. Put Out More Flags. Chapman and Hall, 1942.
Waugh, Evelyn. Rossetti: His Life and Works. Duckworth, 1928.
Waugh, Evelyn. Scoop. Little, Brown, and Company, 1938.
Waugh, Evelyn. Scoop. Chapman and Hall, 1938.
Waugh, Evelyn. The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh. Editor Davie, Michael, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976.
Waugh, Evelyn. The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. Editor Amory, Mark, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1980.
Mitford, Nancy, and Evelyn Waugh. The Letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh. Editor Mosley, Charlotte, Hodder and Stoughton, 1996.
Waugh, Evelyn, and Stuart Boyle. The Loved One. Chapman and Hall, 1948.
Waugh, Evelyn. Unconditional Surrender. Chapman and Hall, 1961.
Waugh, Evelyn. Vile Bodies. Chapman and Hall, 1930.