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.
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...
Friends, Associates
Ruth Pitter
RP
knew T. S. Eliot
well enough to enjoy a courtly encounter with him at a bus stop, but she felt his great innovations had not necessarily been a good thing for English poetry, and...
Reception
Barbara Pym
Another element that makes her hard to place is her comedy. Though her work has been likened to that of Drabble
and Lively
(both her champions) her place is rather with out-and-out satirists like Angela Thirkell
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...
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...
Friends, Associates
Edith Sitwell
Harper became for ES
what Evelyn Waugh
and the Lygon sisters had termed in the 1920s a jagger. Such a friend was generous, supportive, uncritical, helpful, and at the same time undemanding. Harper was...
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
Family and Intimate relationships
Freya Stark
Besse had Middle Eastern connections, being based in Aden. He met Evelyn Waugh
in 1931, and Waugh wrote amusingly about him in When the Going Was Good. Besse was also married, and FS
accepted...
Literary responses
G. B. Stern
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...
