52 pages • 1 hour read
Evelyn WaughBrideshead Revisited
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
EpilogueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Epilogue Summary
Charles’s commanding officer laments the conditions at Brideshead. When he asks if anyone knows the area, Charles remains silent. A retired soldier from the area reports that “Lady Julia Flyte, as she calls herself now” still lives at Brideshead (326); she is still married to Rex and is currently serving in a women’s corps abroad. Marchmain left the house to her alone. The retired soldier shows them around Brideshead, including the paintings that Charles once did himself. Charles wanders the “desolate” house, eventually encountering a maid who recognizes him. Nanny Hawkins still lives upstairs; Charles finds her shockingly aged. Nanny reports that Julia and Cordelia are serving abroad; Brideshead and Beryl (now Lord and Lady Marchmain) had their first house bombed, their second requisitioned. Beryl now lives in a hotel. Rex is in residence; Nanny approves of his anti-Hitler rhetoric. Brideshead is serving in Palestine, as are Cordelia and Julia.
Charles speaks with Nanny for a while; when he returns, he finds that Hooper has been tricked by their subordinates, who wished to get out of working. Hooper marvels at the size of the house for a single family and Charles bitterly comments that he has neither home nor family. Charles visits the chapel, where he prays. Though he feels sorrow at the downfall of the house, he sees a small flame, which gives him hope and a sense of connection to the past.
Epilogue Analysis
The novel’s Epilogue has the same title as its Prologue—“Brideshead Revisited”—suggesting both the continuity between these two portions of the text and their significance to the overall novel. That Charles ends the novel experiencing hope as he looks at a small light in the long-deserted Flyte chapel offers a hopeful note to the numerous tragic events in the book, not least the brutality of World War II. As Charles feels his connection to those in the past who would have seen a similar, flickering flame, the novel suggests that though the precise world of the 1920s and 1930s may no longer exist, it isn’t totally lost. The novel’s exploration of Memory and Nostalgia thus takes on a hopeful aspect. The light, the Epilogue suggests, will endure, “burning anew among the old stones” (331).
The last scene of the novel foregrounds the theme of Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism. Critics have debated the authenticity of Charles’s conversion, just as they have debated whether Sebastian’s ending is a bleak indictment of his unwillingness to seek sobriety or a positive vision of the vast potential for grace under (a Catholic) God. Waugh’s longstanding comments that the novel depicts the beauty of divine grace suggests that the author, at least, takes this conversion to be legitimate. Charles’s recognition that he has lost everything that matters to him in his life, such as his family and home, however, opens the novel to the interpretation that Charles’s religious conviction is not the open-hearted acceptance of God’s love that, say, Cordelia or Brideshead might have wished for him, but rather more akin to Marchmain’s halfhearted recognition of final rites: the reluctant commitment of a man with nothing left to lose.
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By Evelyn Waugh
