Brideshead Revisited
Brideshead Revisited is a novel by Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. It has become well-known to modern audiences as a result of the ITV drama serialisation of 1981, produced by Granada Television. In a list of the 100 Greatest British Television Programmes drawn up by the British Film Institute in 2000, voted for by industry professionals, the adaptation was placed 10th.
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.
After a distasteful chance first encounter, protagonist Charles Ryder, a student at Oxford, and the Lord Sebastian Flyte, fellow student and the younger son of an aristocratic family, become fast friends. The Lord Sebastian takes him to the palatial home of his family, Brideshead, where Charles eventually meets the rest of the Flyte family, including Sebastian's sister, the Lady Julia.
The Lord Sebastian's family are Catholic, though scandalously, his father, the Marquesss of Marchmain, has left his mother and gone to live in Venice with a mistress. Religious considerations arise frequently among the family, and prove to govern the details of their lives as well as the content of their conversations, all of which surprises Charles, who had always assumed Christianity to be without substance or merit. The Lord Sebastian, in some ways a troubled young man, learns to find greater solace in alcohol than in religion, and descends into that vice, drifting away from the family over a two-year period, which occasions Charles' own estrangement from the Flytes. Yet Charles is fated to re-encounter the Flyte family over the years, and eventually forms a relationship with the Lady Julia, who by that time is married but separated. Charles plans to divorce his own wife so he and the Lady Julia can marry, until the Lady Julia, motivated by her father's deathbed return to the Catholic faith, decides that she can no longer live in sin, and indeed can no longer contemplate marriage to Charles. Lord Marchmain's reception of the sacrament of extreme unction also influences Charles, who was "in search of love in those days" when he first met Sebastian, "that low door in the wall...which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden," a metaphor that informs the work on a number of levels.¹ Waugh desired that the book should be about the "operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters."
During the Second World War, Ryder, now an army officer and an architectural artist, is billeted at Brideshead, once a home to many of his affections. It occurs to him that builders' efforts are not in vain, even when their purposes may appear, for a time, to be frustrated.
The book was adapted for television by John Mortimer, starring Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder, Anthony Andrews as the Lord Sebastian Flyte, Laurence Olivier as Lord Marchmain, Claire Bloom as Lady Marchmain, Diana Quick as the Lady Julia Flyte; also starring Phoebe Nicholls, John Gielgud, Nickolas Grace, and Charles Keating. The Oxford scenes were filmed in Oxford colleges. The location for Brideshead was Castle Howard in Yorkshire. Scenes on the deck of a Transatlantic liner were filmed aboard the QE2.
