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 Excerpt
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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
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...
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...
Publishing Nancy Mitford
NM dedicated her novel The Blessing to Evelyn Waugh .
Mitford, Nancy. “Critical Materials”. Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford, edited by Charlotte Mosley, Hodder and Stoughton, p. various pages.
xxi, 243, 282-3n3
Family and Intimate relationships Nancy Mitford
Three of NM 's sisters took up extreme political positions in the 1930s. Diana , the third in age, left her first marriage to be with Sir Oswald Mosley , leader of the British Union of Fascists
Friends, Associates Nancy Mitford
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...

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