Migliori Libri di Evelyn Waugh

This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh’s published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text’s manuscript development and textual variants. The edition’s General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh’s grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence. In winter 1954, Evelyn Waugh took a voyage to Sri Lanka to escape the English cold and recover his ailing health. Visibly unwell when he boarded ship, once at sea he began suffering auditory hallucinations that pursued him through his ‘holiday’ and back on to an early flight home. He then fictionalized his experiences as The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. This curious novel has baffled and intrigued critics ever since its first publication in 1957 and is now presented in a full critical edition. This new volume charts the creation and publication of the novel and examines its cultural and literary significance, noting every textual change and revision from manuscript to the last edition to be published in Evelyn Waugh’s lifetime. It has a comprehensive appendix of contextual notes and an extensive scholarly introduction covering all aspects of the history of this text and its place in cultural and literary history. It draws on newly discovered material, including Waugh’s engagement diaries, to tell the story behind the narrative and explain how fantasy and painful reality intertwine in this highly biographical work of fiction.

This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh’s published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text’s manuscript development and textual variants. The edition’s General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh’s grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence. Evelyn Waugh originally wrote his Edmund Campion to thank Martin D’Arcy, SJ, and to help with the building of Campion Hall, but his experience of Communist oppression in Mexico and Croatia transformed his understanding of Campion’s life, revealing Campion less as an Elizabethan martyr than as part of ‘the unending war’ between the church and the totalitarian state. Waugh wrote a passionate new ‘Preface’ for the American edition of 1946 and made important changes to each of the three subsequent editions, culminating in the beautiful third edition of 1961. This new edition provides extensive biographical and contextual notes to help the reader unfamiliar with early modern history and records the many manuscript revisions and the book’s reception both sides of the Atlantic. The introduction explores the personal impact of Waugh’s friendship with the Asquith and Herbert families and examines the cultural context of a brief period of confidence for English Catholicism, energized by the canonization process (in which Waugh’s own daughters were involved), which coincided with the publication of the five editions of the book from 1935 to 1961. Waugh received the Hawthornden Prize for the book just before he took part in the opening of Campion Hall; the book offered him a Jesuit hearth in the ‘household of the faith’ and gave a new theological direction to his writing, characterized by Brideshead Revisited, Helena, The Sword of Honour trilogy, and Ronald Knox. The book emerges as one of the best objets d’Arcy, which Waugh continued to give to friends till his death.

Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) is often thought to be among his best novels. It is a darkly bitter account of the end of a marriage, its causes and its effects. Waugh wrote the book with half an eye on his own recent experience of the break-up of his marriage to Evelyn Gardner. The care and trouble he took over the work are reflected in his successive revisions of its text in manuscript and print. These can be recovered from sources on both sides of the Atlantic, notably from the autograph and typescript manuscript in the Harry Ransom Center at Austin, Texas, a proof copy of the first edition at the Huntington Library in California, in the serialization in different versions of the first part of the novel in Harper’s Bazaar, prepared for the UK and the US markets, and in four editions published in his lifetime in the UK and one in the US. All of these witnesses have been collated in this, the first fully edited and annotated edition of the novel. There is a substantial introduction describing the novel’s composition and reception, as well as the literary influences on which Waugh drew-including Shakespeare, Dickens, Kipling, and Beatrix Potter. The edition seeks to show Waugh as a consummate craftsman, at work on a painful subject that he treats in comic, tragic, and satirical ways.