WAUGH, Evelyn (1903-66). Brideshead Revisited, London, 1945, 8vo, original pink cloth, dust-jacket (torn with some loss at corners). FIRST EDITION.

WAUGH, Evelyn (1903-66).  Brideshead Revisited. The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. A Novel. London: Chapman & Hall, 1945. 8vo (185 x 120mm). Half title (some leaves with short tears at upper margin, not affecting text, some extremely faint spotting with the occasional small darker stains). Original pink cloth, the spine lettered and decorated in gilt (lower corners a little bumped, extremities very lightly rubbed), dust-jacket (jacket torn with loss at corners including a few letters of the publisher's name, some other fraying, creasing and staining). Provenance: From the Collection of Professor Jonathan Brostoff, D.M., D.Sc., FRCP, FRCPath (1934-2020); Beth Mills (signature on front free endpaper). FIRST EDITION of what the author often referred to as his magnum opus. Of all his novels, it was certainly the one which most captured the public's imagination and even entered the national psyche due in a large part to the lavish and critically-acclaimed Granada Television adaptation of 1981. "The first print run of Brideshead sold out within a few days at the end of May 1945. It was three weeks since V.E. Day. The streets had been full of crowds and bunting, the bells had rung for the first time in five years. But long-pent tension and and grief had not dissolved and, in a climate of compulsory cheerfulness, Waugh's novel of extravagant melancholy tapped some of the currents of feeling that ran beneath the celebrations" (Harris, Romantic Moderns (2010), p.272). "I have read Brideshead Revisited at least a dozen times and have never failed to be charmed and moved, even to tears. It is, appropriately, a seductive book ... This is one of those disturbing novels in which the faults do not matter ... Apart from its literary qualities, it breathes a theological certainty which, if a little chic, is a world away from the confusion of Greeneland and the squalor of the Irish. It is a novel altogether readable and damnably magical" (Burgess Ninety-Nine Novels (1984), p.35). John Howard Wilson Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Biography (1996) p.108. RARE.