Brideshead Revisited is one of the great English novels of the twentieth century. It is beloved, but it also provokes antipathy — as it always has. When Evelyn Waugh wrote the novel in 1945 many of his fellow writers reviled it. They, like so many secular contemporary readers, found its Catholicism bizarre, its breathless depiction of the upper classes appalling, and the prose grossly over-stylized. All of this was intentional. Brideshead was supposed to be a door into a lost world.
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