The editors of The American Scholar put together a list of books for Valentine’s Day reading. The idea was to “celebrate the whole history of love—even the ugly bits—with these 14 novels of romance gone awry.” Among those selected was Waugh Brideshead Revisited:
Poor Charles Ryder is drawn into the tumultuous currents of the aristocratic Marchmain family, where platonic and romantic love conspire to change their lives forever—leaving almost every character in the novel disillusioned, divorced, or dead.
Other works included in the list are Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Stephen King’s The Shining.
A book blog (Tony’s Book World) had the same idea but used less complicated criteria for selection to its list. They named books with “love” in the title and selected The Loved One:
Here is a short humorous novel satirizing the Forest Lawn Cemetery and the funeral industry. It resulted from a trip by Evelyn Waugh to Hollywood where someone wanted to adapt one of his novels into a movie.
Other books on their list included two by Waugh’s friends: Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and Henry Green’s Loving.
