Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead [Hardcover]

Paula Byrne (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 30, 2010

Evelyn Waugh was already famous when Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945. The chronicle of a household, a family, and a journey of religious faith—an elegy for a vanishing world—Waugh's masterwork was a tribute and testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier. The Lygons of Madresfield were every bit as glamorous, eccentric, and fascinating as their fictional Brideshead counterparts, their story just as compelling, filled with secrets and betrayals, scandals and unwavering love.

Mad World is Paula Byrne's innovative and engrossing biography of Evelyn Waugh, recalling the loves and obsessions that shaped his world and his writing, capturing Waugh through the friendships that mattered most to him, and exploring how he encoded the defining experiences of his adult life in his greatest literary work.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

As much as this is a biography of Evelyn Waugh, it is also the biography of the family that inspired his best-known novel, Brideshead Revisited. The product of a middle-class upbringing and a middling public school, Waugh’s experience at Oxford was an awakening. There, he fell in with a sophisticated crowd that had at its center the glamorous Hugh Lygon, second son in an aristocratic Catholic family. Scandal-ridden as well, the eminent patriarch, Lord Beauchamp, was forced to leave the country because of homosexual activities. Waugh became close friends with several of Hugh’s sisters, whose doings seemed to exemplify the spirit of the age. Their splendid house Madresfield Court—called Mad for short—offered the template for Brideshead, just as Hugh provided the model for Sebastian Flyte. Readers don’t necessarily need to be conversant with Waugh’s novels in order to enjoy this well-researched and absorbing account, but those who are will be fascinated by Byrne’s exploration of how Waugh used elements from his own life to shape his work. Expect requests for Brideshead Revisited from patrons who get their hands on this. --Mary Ellen Quinn

Review

“Altogether excellent and wickedly entertaining…Scandalous detail enlivens every page of this delicious biography…Over the years I’ve read all the major biographies of Evelyn Waugh, and Byrne’s is…the fastest moving and the most fun.” (Michael Dirda, Washington Post )

“Remarkable…not only a meticulously researched biography but also an enjoyable read.” (Library Journal )

“Well-researched and absorbing.” (Booklist )

“An utterly captivating and generous book with all the intimacy of a diary and the scholarly soundness of a fine biography…A singular accomplishment.” (Chicago Tribune )

“A sharp, entertaining literary biography…A perceptive study of how Evelyn Waugh emerged from middle-class beginnings to inhabit the tony corridors described in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED.” (Kirkus Reviews )

“A splendid new book…While displaying the research values of a scholar Byrne also manages to write with the panache and timing of a popular novelist.” (Alexander Waugh, Daily Beast )

“’Mad World’ is the perfect title for this sparkling book, a hybrid of family romance, incisive literary criticism, and deliciously hot gossip.” (Martin Rubin, Washington Times )

“An engaging book…remarkably thorough…Deftly interweaving biographical details and textual analysis, Byrne makes the connections between Waugh’s art, Roman Catholic faith, and life dance.” (Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor )

“A considerable contribution to literary history…includes enough gossipy asides to intrigue readers.” (Publishers Weekly )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (March 30, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060881305
• ISBN-13: 978-0060881306
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #439,776 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paula was born in Birkenhead in 1967, the third daughter in a large working-class Catholic family. She studied English and Theology at the college that is now Chichester University and then taught English and Drama at Wirral Grammar School for Boys and Wirral Metropolitan College. She then completed her MA and PhD in English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She is now a full-time writer, living with her husband, the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, and their three young children (Tom, Ellie and Harry) in an old farmhouse in a South Warwickshire village near Stratford-upon-Avon.

Paula is represented by The Wylie Agency. She is an Executive Trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Warwick.

Paula is the author of the top ten bestseller Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson (HarperCollins UK, Random House USA). A selection for the 2005 Richard and Judy Book Club and a British Book Awards 'Best Read' nomination, Perdita was also long-listed for the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize. It tells the extraordinary story of the eighteenth-century actress, poet, novelist, feminist, celebrity and royal mistress Mary 'Perdita' Robinson (1757-1800).

Paula's first book, shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize, was Jane Austen and the Theatre, published in 2002 and reissued in paperback in 2007 by Hambledon Continuum. Paul Johnson of The Spectator chose it as his best-ever book on Jane Austen and the Times Literary Supplement described as a 'definitive and pioneering study of a wholly neglected aspect of Austen's art.' She has also edited a Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Jane Austen's Emma.

Paula has published essays on a wide range of women authors, reviews for the Sunday Telegraph and the TLS, and in her new book tells the story of Evelyn Waugh's friendship with the extraordinary aristocratic family who inspired Brideshead Revisited. Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead is published worldwide by HarperCollins, with the UK edition out in August 2009 and the USA edition forthcoming in early March 2010.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

73 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book as good as its subject, November 18, 2009

By 

I. Sondel "I. Sondel - lover of the arts" (Tallahassee, FL United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mad World (Hardcover)

I freely admit to an aversion to most biographies; those half ton tomes stuffed to overflowing with superfluous information, regurgitated facts that represent the flotsam and jetsam of the life in question as opposed to actual milestones and achievements. Happily, this is not the case with Paula Byrne's Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead Mad World, a biography as witty and amusing as its subject, which, in the case of Evelyn Waugh, is saying a great deal.

As is the case with most historical biographies, Mad World follows Waugh's life from cradle to grave. As we trek along we are treated to brief portraits of Waugh's parents and brother Alec, all those Mitford sisters, his annulled first marriage and life-long second, his conversion to Catholicism, as well as pointedly detailed descriptions of his published works, including Vile Bodies, A Handful of Dust and Brideshead Revisited.

The pace picks up (and never flags) once Waugh enters Oxford, where he quickly develops friendships with the likes of Harold Acton and Brian Howard, and enters into a series of homosexual relationships, the most profound and lasting with Hugh Lygon, second son of the 7th Earl Beauchamp, and the inspiration for Brideshead's Sebastian Flyte.

Waugh is taken under Lygon's wing, and is introduced to the family, becoming a life-long friend and confidante of sisters Mary and Dorothy, as well as a fixture at the family manse Madresfield (hence "Mad World"); and was witness to the disgrace of Earl Beauchamp, forced to flee the country or face charges of Gross Indecency, and the family's dishonor.

Byrne has painstakingly researched her material, and though her finished text is rich in detail and critical observances, it seems never heavy handed or in the least tedious. Indeed, her work reads as though it were a novel, a modern day retelling of Waugh's classic Brideshead Revisited, which is the kindest compliment it could be paid.

17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A GREAT COMPANION TO BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, April 7, 2010

By 

ireadabookaday - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (Hardcover)

While I love literature, I am very rarely interested in books that accompany it- biographies, collections of letters, or books that purport to tell the " real story" behind the book. This is delightful exception.

I was intrigued by the real family that inspired " Brideshead" and the author does a great job of explaining Waugh's close relationship them, how he did or did not disguise them in the novel, and the reaction of the family to the book. ( Did anyone ever really belive the author's note "I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they."?)

In addition to the biographical information that helps us understand Waugh and the world he created, the author does a good job of placing the real people and events in context, giving us a better understanding of the intersection of Catholicism and the peerage that is so important to the novel, and of the theme of people struggling to reconcile their lives with God and theology. A must read for anyone who has read and loved
"Brideshead Revisited"

35 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mad World and Secrets of Brideshead, September 26, 2009

By 

Mr. A. Walker-powell "Tony Powell" (Sydney NSW Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mad World (Hardcover)

A biography needs to have a Point of View. Usually it is its subject and should be so if he is unlikely to be portrayed more than once. Evelyn Waugh is not such a case. The interest in him is sufficiently wide to accommodate different Points of View. Mad World is written from the Point of View of the Lygon family, with whom Waugh was friendly and whose members are in part associated with individual characters in Brideshead Revisited.
Paula Byrne has done her subject proud and, if one puts a price on the pleasure something provides, it is hopelessly under-priced. Mad World reveals much of what I did not know of Evelyn Waugh, even though I have read about him to a considerable degree. It reveals much more about the Lygon family members. How interesting it is that seemingly insignificant events in Brideshead Revisited happened in one degree or another to people mentioned in this biography. Two villains make their appearance. The first is the second Duke of Westminster, a character as malignant to the seventh Earl Beauchamp as the appalling Marquess of Queensbury was to Oscar Wilde. The second villain was King George V. He abandoned his loyal servant Beauchamp to the Duke of Westminster's knavery in a manner only less reprehensible to the way he abandoned his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II.
After Brideshead Revisited, life did not proceed smoothly for any of the people in this book. I remind myself of the conversation between Cordelia and Charles in Brideshead:
` ... such an engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works.' Did you think "thwarted"?'
It was no time for prevarication. `Yes,' I said, `I did; I don't now so much.'
`It's funny,' she said, `that's exactly the word I thought for you and Julia when we were up in the nursery with nanny. "Thwarted passion," I thought...'
Thwarted. That's what happened to them all.
Paula Byrne's style is free of journalistic puffery, therefore this biography is authoritative. I find very few vague points.