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Books Like Brideshead Revisited
What to read after Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945) is the great English novel of Catholic aristocracy and lost worlds — Charles Ryder's love for Sebastian Flyte, for Julia Flyte, and for the house Brideshead itself, and the slow working of divine grace through lives that resist it. If you were drawn to its elegiac prose and its portrait of a world in the process of being lost, these novels will find you in the same territory.
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
Stevens, the English butler who gave his life to his profession and realizes too late what he has missed — the most direct heir to Brideshead Revisited in the English novel; where Charles Ryder can clearly see what he has lost in the Flyte family, Stevens cannot quite bring himself to see what he has lost in Miss Kenton; both novels are elegies for a lost England and for the people who were formed by it
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A Room with a View
by E.M. Forster
Lucy Honeychurch in Florence and Surrey — the Edwardian English novel most directly about the liberation from repressive social convention; where Brideshead Revisited mourns the passing of a world, A Room with a View celebrates the escape from it; the two novels together give you the English class system from inside the freedom it denied and from inside the nostalgia it left behind
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The Pursuit of Love
by Nancy Mitford
Linda Radlett and her cousins growing up in an eccentric English aristocratic family between the wars — Mitford is Waugh's closest contemporary in the literature of the English upper class; The Pursuit of Love is funny where Brideshead is elegiac, but both are portraits of an aristocratic world that is recognizably the same world and that both writers knew from the inside
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A Handful of Dust
by Evelyn Waugh
Tony Last, whose Edwardian country house world is destroyed by his faithless wife — Waugh's most purely comic and most purely savage novel; published in 1934, eleven years before Brideshead Revisited, it shows what Waugh was doing before he converted to the elegiac mode; the country house that is lost in A Handful of Dust is the same country house that is mourned in Brideshead Revisited
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The Go-Between
by L.P. Hartley
Leo Colston's memories of the summer of 1900, when he carried messages between his school friend's sister and a local farmer — one of the most celebrated English novels of loss and innocence; the novel that opens 'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.' The country house setting and the retrospective structure are shared with Brideshead Revisited, and both novels are elegies for an Edwardian world destroyed by the twentieth century
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Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis
Jim Dixon's disastrous year at a provincial university — Amis's Lucky Jim is explicitly a reaction against the Brideshead world: the aesthetic pretension, the cultural snobbery, the romantic nostalgia for an England that only ever existed for a few; reading both novels shows the comic and the elegiac approaches to the English class system in postwar fiction
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The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
A whisky priest in Mexico during the Cristero War — Greene's most fully Catholic novel and the companion to Brideshead Revisited in English Catholic fiction; where Waugh approaches Catholicism through the aristocratic world of the Flyte family and the working of grace as something beautiful, Greene approaches it through a morally compromised man in an ugly situation
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Decline and Fall
by Evelyn Waugh
Paul Pennyfeather's absurd adventures after being expelled from Oxford — Waugh's first novel and the one that established his reputation as a comic writer; completely different in tone from Brideshead Revisited (comic rather than elegiac, satirical rather than nostalgic) but set in overlapping social worlds; the best introduction to Waugh's range
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