Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Evelyn Waugh
-
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.
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
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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
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
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...
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...
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...
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...