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On September 25th, Castle Howard, the magnificent baroque mansion in Yorkshire used as a location for the 1981 Granada Television series Brideshead Revisited
Two days later, on September 27th, Dr. Ridgway will be giving a public lecture, "Castle Howard and Brideshead: Fact, Fiction and In-Between." The talk will be followed by a reception and an opportunity to review relevant material from the archives.
Newspaper reports of Brideshead Day mention that Dr. Ridgway will launch a new book at the event with the same title as his public lecture. Additional information on this will be posted when available.
UPDATE (September 13): A Yorkshire Post story about Castle Howard and its Brideshead celebration: "Three decades on, Brideshead revisited again by historic mansion".
UPDATE (September 21): Dr. Ridgway's new book is Castle Howard and Brideshead: Fact, Fiction and In-Between, published by Castle Howard, 64pp, £10. It is available for purchase at Castle Howard, which will also accept orders by telephone and email.
The Society's third Evelyn Waugh Conference, held at Downside Abbey and School in Somerset, England, concluded on August 19th.
The conference schedule included papers by eminent Waugh researchers Donat Gallagher, Robert Murray Davis, and Ann Pasternak Slater, and presentations by Paula Byrne, author of Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead
The conference included two Somerset excursions, the first to the village of Mells, which has strong Waugh associations, and the second to Combe Florey, where Waugh lived from 1957 until his death in 1966.
Conference participants at the gatehouse of Combe Florey House, Evelyn Waugh's residence in Combe Florey
The writer Jonathan Keates, interviewed by The Browser for their splendid FiveBooks series, selects Evelyn Waugh as one of his "great letter writers."
The thing about Evelyn Waugh is that you must take everything with a pinch of salt. Because there is this kind of parallel universe in which he lives. The pleasure of reading his letters is to see somebody at work on constructing a personality, on constructing a self. Which isn’t necessarily his true self. Do we ever get to the true self in Waugh? I think we don’t. I don’t think he necessarily knew where it was himself. What you get instead is this apparently tweedy, peevish, reactionary figure – but underneath it amazingly perceptive and very funny.
St. Augustine's Press is publishing in October a new edition of A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes, a collection of letters between Evelyn Waugh and John Cardinal Heenan concerning the liturgical changes introduced by the Catholic Church in the 1960s. From the publisher's website:
For the last decade of his life, Evelyn Waugh experienced the changes being made to the Church’s liturgy to be nothing short of “a bitter trial.” In Cardinal Heenan he found a sympathetic pastor and a kindred spirit. This volume makes available the previously unpublished correspondence between these prominent Catholics, revealing in both an incisive disquiet.
A Bitter Trial is available for pre-order
In The Spectator, Paul Johnson examines the life and works of the young Evelyn Waugh:
Evelyn Waugh died, aged 62, in 1966, and his reputation has risen steadily ever since. His status as the finest English prose-writer of the 20th century is now being marked by an annotated complete edition of his works, sumptuously published by the Oxford University Press. As a prolegomenon, Penguin is issuing another complete edition in hardback, the first eight volumes of which are now available, priced £20 each. They include his life of Rossetti, three travel books, Labels, Remote People and Ninety-two Days, and his first four novels, Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies, Black Mischief and A Handful of Dust. These books, published between 1928 and 1934, cover his emergence as a major novelist.
A dramatic adaptation by Christina Drollas of Brideshead Revisited opens at the Corpus Christi College Auditorium in Oxford on Tuesday, June 14th. Tickets. Sarah Gashi provides a preview in The Oxford Student.
Professor Marc DiPaolo of Okalahoma City University is compiling a book of essays on controversial theology in fiction. He would like to include an essay on Brideshead Revisited, as well as essays on Graham Greene, C. S. Lewis, G. B. Shaw, etc. Essays should be 6,000-8,500 words in length, accompanied by an abstract of no more than 250 words and a 30-40 word biographical
sketch. Dr. DiPaolo can be contacted by email at (click to email) and by phone at (405) 306-2103.
England's Colchester Bookshop is offering for sale a copy of Decline and Fall inscribed to Osbert Sitwell. From the listing at AbeBooks.com:
An exceptional association and presentation copy from the very beginning of Evelyn Waugh's career as an author, dated within 12 days of publication of his first novel, (published 18 September 1928). Waugh was a regular visitor to the Sitwells, the last entry in his diaries before publication of Decline & Fall recording that he drank too much while dining with Osbert three days before drawing the dust jacket. Evelyn Waugh's signature is comparable to that used in his letters in 1928, and less florid than that found in most other presentation copies, which appear to have been inscribed some months or years after publication. This sets the current copy apart as extraordinarily rare; one of very few copies of his first novel that Waugh would have distributed to selected members of his social circle on publication, among whom Osbert Sitwell was arguably the most senior literary figure.
As of the date of this post, the asking price is US $20,126.99, plus $6.51 shipping.
A new book of essays on Evelyn Waugh edited by three members of the Evelyn Waugh Society has been published by Rowman & Littlefield. From the publisher's website:
A Handful of Mischief: New Essays on Evelyn Waugh is a collection of essays based on presentations at the Evelyn Waugh Centenary Conference at Hertford College, Oxford, in 2003. There are twelve different essays by authors from various countries, including Australia, Canada, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The essays cover a wide range of material, from Waugh's early novel Black Mischief (1932) to his last travel book, A Tourist in Africa (1960). In addition to essays on well-known novels such as Scoop (1938), Brideshead Revisited (1945), and Helena (1950), the collection includes papers on Waugh's library, his changing conception of Oxford, his writing about religious conversion, and his role in the British evacuation of Crete in 1941. The authors approach Waugh and his work in various ways, and innovative essays explore sovereignty, post-colonialism, and adaptation for radio.
A Handful of Mischief: New Essays on Evelyn Waugh
