Following his recent appearance at the Appledore Literary Festival, Duncan McLaren has posted two new articles to his website. “Evelyn in Appledore” and “When Henry Met Evelyn” recount the details of Evelyn Waugh’s visit to that town where he worked on the second half of Vile Bodies while staying at the Royal George Hotel.
The articles also explore Waugh’s relationship with novelist Henry Williamson who lived in nearby Georgeham, North Devon. He is best known for Tarka the Otter but also wrote a series of novels entitled Chronicles of Ancient Sunlight in which a character based on Waugh appears in the volume The Power of the Dead (1963). As McLaren explains, Williamson was a close friend of John Heygate and his wife Evelyn, former wife of Waugh, who also appear as characters in Williamson’s novel.
