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This is an engaging biography about Evelyn Waugh, the famed author of Brideshead Revisited, (available on book and dvd) and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece. Written at the height of the war, the novel is the story of a household, a family and a journey of religious faith - an elegy for a vanishing world and a testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier. The Lygons of Madresfield were every bit as glamorous, eccentric and compelling as their literary counterparts, the Marchmains of Brideshead. William Lygon, Earl Beauchamp, was a warm-hearted, generous and unconventional father whose seven children adored him. When he was outed as homosexual by his scheming brother-in-law in 1931, and forced to flee the country, his traumatised children stood firmly by him, defying not only the mores of the day, but also their deeply religious mother. Paula Byrne captures Waugh through the friendships and loves that mattered most to him. She uncovers a man who, far from the snobbish misanthropist of popular caricature, was as loving and complex as the family that inspired him. This original biography unlocks for the first time the extent to which Waugh's great novel encoded and transformed his own experiences. In so doing, it illuminates the loves and obsessions that shaped his life, and brings us inevitably to a secret that dared not speak its name.
Paperback, 384 Pages, Published 2011
Author: Paula Byrne