Brideshead Revisited

Brideshead Revisited is a novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. Its full title is Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.

The book moves from the 1920s to the early 1940s and is divided into three parts, with a prologue and an epilogue. It opens with Ryder's battalion quartered at Brideshead Castle, where he had spent time as a young man, and the rest of the novel is his account of how he came to be part of the family's world. As an Oxford undergraduate he meets Sebastian Flyte, whose charm and unhappiness draw him into a household defined by its religion, its wealth and its mother's authority. Later he returns to the family through Julia, Sebastian's sister, and through a career as a painter of country houses, and the book follows both relationships and the slow disintegration of the world they belong to.

Waugh's subject is nostalgia as much as it is the aristocracy, and the novel deals openly with Catholicism and with how a family's faith shapes the choices its members are able to make. It was adapted as a television serial in 1981 and as a film in 2008.