Evelyn Waugh

28 October 1903 - 10 April 1966

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.

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Connections

Connections	Author name Sort ascending	Excerpt
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	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
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...
Publishing	Muriel Spark	MS received £100 for it, half as an advance. Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark. The Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 164 She finished writing in late 1955, but then hit a snag: Macmillan developed cold feet about its being difficult. During this hiatus the proofs...
Literary responses	Muriel Spark	Evelyn Waugh —whose novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, also about hallucinations, appeared a few months after Spark's—called the book very clever, Spark, Muriel. Curriculum Vitae: Autobiography. Constable. 207 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
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. Glendinning, Victoria. Edith Sitwell. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 211
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...
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...
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
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...
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...

Timeline

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 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.