Evelyn Waugh’s most celebrated novel is a memory drama about the intense entanglement of the narrator, Charles Ryder, with a great Anglo-Catholic family. Written during World War II, the novel mourns the passing of the aristocratic world Waugh knew in his youth and vividly recalls the sensuous plea­sures denied him by wartime austerities; in so doing it also provides a profound study of the conflict between the demands of religion and the desires of the flesh. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh’s familiar satiric exploration of his cast of lords and ladies, Catholics and eccentrics, artists and misfits, revealing him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.

The edition reprinted here contains Waugh’s revisions, made in 1959, and his preface to the revised edition.

伊夫林·沃被誉为“英语文学史上最具摧毁力和最在成果的讽刺小说家之一”。伊夫林·沃1903年10月28日生于英国汉普斯特德，其父阿瑟·沃系英国著名出版商兼文学批评家，1928年发表了第一部长篇小说《衰落与瓦解》，一举成名。此后，沃专心写作，先后出版了长篇小说20余部，短篇小说集两部，以及书信集数部，其中被誉为佳作的有：《衰落与瓦解》，《一抔土》（1934）、《旧地重游》（1945）、《荣誉之剑》（1965）等。沃曾于40年代后期为《旧地重游》搬上银幕一事访问好莱坞，并根据此间搜集的素材创作了《受爱戴的》（1948），这是他最畅销的长篇小说之一。