Brideshead Revisited

Castle Howard, England venue for Brideshead

The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

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Brideshead Revisited is my favourite novel, although I am an evangelical Christian.

• The story and the history move me, and especially the language.

• There is beauty here and holiness, shining through the profane.

• Grace permeates the novel and reveals the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Join me over the next few weeks as we travel through this anointed narrative and experience Grace

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First published in 1945, Brideshead Revisited is the most explicitly Christian novel by Evelyn Waugh, and one of the great religious novels of the twentieth century. Written at the end of World War II, it is a work of remembrance—of youth, of England, of beauty—but more deeply, of grace.

The story unfolds through memory. Its narrator, Charles Ryder, looks back on his formative years and the people who shaped his life. What he remembers is not simply a lost world, but a series of encounters with faith—often unrecognized at the time, yet decisive in retrospect.

Brideshead Revisited Dramatis Personae

• Charles Ryder – An artist and seeker, drawn first by beauty and friendship, only gradually awakening to the spiritual reality beneath them.

• Sebastian Flyte – Charles’s closest friend at Oxford: charming, wounded, self-destructive, and quietly marked by a faith he tries desperately to escape.

• Julia Flyte – Sebastian’s sister, intelligent and passionate, whose adult love story with Charles becomes the novel’s central moral conflict.

• Lady Marchmain – The Flyte matriarch, a devout Roman Catholic whose piety shapes—and troubles—the lives of her children.

• Lord Marchmain – Estranged from his family and the Church, yet summoned at the end to a moment of reckoning and grace.

• Cordelia Flyte – The youngest Flyte, whose simple, unpretentious faith often speaks the deepest truths in the novel.

  
  

Together, these lives revolve around Brideshead itself—the great house that gives the novel its name—at once a symbol of beauty, memory, and spiritual inheritance. What binds them is not success or happiness, but God’s persistent pursuit, working through weakness, failure, and delay.

Brideshead Revisited is not a sentimental defense of religion, nor a moral fable with easy endings. It is a story about how grace operates—quietly, patiently, sometimes painfully—until even the most resistant hearts are brought to a point of decision.

On this Friday, we begin with the people of Brideshead, knowing that through their stories, Waugh invites us to consider our own: how we remember, what we love, and whether we recognize grace when it comes to us disguised as loss.

Over the next ten weeks, we will follow Evelyn Waugh's outline and presentation in five parts and six stages. Today's article is an introduction. Next Frida. Stage II — Oxford & Innocence

Friday 2 – Charles Ryder at Oxford. I trust you are looking forward to this as much as I am.

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Waugh wrote that the novel "deals with what is theologically termed 'the operation of Grace', that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself." I think he would have liked this song:

GOD LEADS US ALONG

In shady, green pastures, so rich and so sweet,

God leads His dear children along;

Where the water’s cool flow bathes the weary one’s feet,

God leads His dear children along.

Refrain

Some through the waters, some through the flood,

Some through the fire, but all through the blood;

Some through great sorrow, but God gives a song,

In the night season and all the day long.

Sometimes on the mount where the sun shines so bright,

God leads His dear children along;

Sometimes in the valley, in darkest of night,

God leads His dear children along.

Refrain

Though sorrows befall us and evils oppose,

God leads His dear children along;

Through grace we can conquer, defeat all our foes,

God leads His dear children along.

Refrain

Away from the mire, and away from the clay,

God leads His dear children along;

Away up in glory, eternity’s day,

God leads His dear children along.

Refrain

George A. Young, 1903

The sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his own sheep

BY NAME, and leadeth them out. Jesus in John 10:3

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