Book Club Guide

Brideshead Revisited

by Evelyn Waugh · 1945 · Classics

Key themes

The Catholic faith as loss and grace — and the pull it cannot be escaped
The English class system and its elegiac dissolution
Memory, youth and the gilded past that cannot be recovered

About this book

Charles Ryder, a poor Oxford student, is drawn into the wealthy Catholic Flyte family through his friendship with the charming Sebastian, and into their sumptuous country house. Waugh's elegiac novel — told in retrospect by an ageing Ryder — traces the Flyte family's decline and Charles's reluctant confrontation with religious faith, loss and the vanished world of the English Catholic aristocracy.

Published in 1945, Brideshead Revisited was written while Waugh was on military leave. He described it as a 'hymn to the English Catholic aristocracy' and spent years revising it for a 1960 edition.

Discussion questions

Charles Ryder begins the novel as an unbeliever and ends it — after losing everything that made Brideshead beautiful to him — recognising something he cannot explain. How does Waugh handle the question of faith without making it a simple conversion narrative?
Sebastian Flyte is one of fiction's most affecting portraits of charm and self-destruction. How does Waugh make his decline both foreseeable and painful — and what does it say about the novel's argument about Catholicism?
The novel is narrated by Charles in wartime, looking back on a lost Edwardian-ish world. How does this retrospective framing change what the novel is about — is it primarily about religion, or about loss?
Waugh was himself a Catholic convert. Does the novel's religious framework feel like genuine engagement with difficult questions, or like advocacy?
Brideshead has been criticised for its nostalgia for aristocratic England. Is this a legitimate critique — and does it undermine what the novel achieves?