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.

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
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...
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...
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
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...
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	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...
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...
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)...
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
Friends, Associates	Nancy Mitford	It was during her debutante period that NM met Evelyn Waugh , who became her lifelong friend, correspondent, and literary mentor.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...

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.