Brideshead Revisited
Charles Ryder, a captain in the British army billeted at the requisitioned country house Brideshead in 1944, looks back across his life with the Marchmain family. The book moves from his Oxford friendship with the doomed aristocrat Sebastian Flyte, through his long affair with Sebastian's sister Julia, to the Catholic faith he never shares but watches reshape every Marchmain choice. Waugh wrote the novel during the war as an act of preservation for the aristocratic Catholic England he believed was ending, and the book turns the country house into a stage for grace, charm, sin, and the slow conversion of a narrator who never quite admits it.
What you might want to know about Brideshead Revisited
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A British army captain billeted at a requisitioned country house looks back across his life with an aristocratic Catholic family in Evelyn Waugh's elegiac wartime novel.
Yes. The 1981 ITV series starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews is widely considered one of the great literary adaptations in television history. A 2008 film adaptation also exists, starring Matthew Goode.
Yes, deeply. Evelyn Waugh was a Catholic convert, and Brideshead Revisited is widely read as a meditation on faith, grace, and the complications of Catholic life in 20th-century England. The religious themes are central rather than incidental.
Brideshead Revisited was written by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1945 by Penguin Books, Limited.
Brideshead Revisited is 336 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Brideshead Revisited takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Brideshead Revisited is a standalone novel by Evelyn Waugh, not part of a series.
Brideshead Revisited is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.