Charles is called back to Brideshead after Sebastian incurs a minor injury, and Sebastian and Charles spend the remainder of the holiday together. Sebastian also takes Charles to his family's palatial mansion, Brideshead Castle, in Wiltshire, where Charles later meets the rest of Sebastian's family, including his sister, Lady Julia.ĭuring the long summer holiday, Charles returns home to London, where he lives with his widowed father, Edward Ryder. The following year, Sebastian introduces Charles to his eccentric friends, including the haughty aesthete and homosexual Anthony Blanche. Both Charles and Sebastian had matriculated at Oxford in the Autumn of 1922, Charles doing so shortly before his 19th birthday. In 1923, protagonist and narrator Charles Ryder, an undergraduate reading history at a college very similar to Hertford College, Oxford, is befriended by Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of the Marquess of Marchmain and an undergraduate at Christ Church. Charles Ryder and his battalion are sent to a country estate called Brideshead, which prompts his recollections of the rest of the story. The prologue takes place during the final years of the Second World War. The novel is divided into three parts, framed by a prologue and epilogue. A faithful and well-received television adaptation of the novel was produced in an 11-part miniseries by Granada Television in 1981. The novel explores themes including Catholicism and nostalgia for the age of English aristocracy.

Ryder has relationships with two of the Flytes: Sebastian and Julia. It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of the protagonist Charles Ryder, most especially his friendship with the Flytes, a family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion called Brideshead Castle. Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh