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| Roman Catholic reactionary badass |
Introduction to the
Project
The Complete Works project is working with Oxford University Press to print all Waugh's extant writings and graphic art: novels, biographies, travel writing, short fiction, essays, articles, reportage, reviews, letters (about 85% of which are currently unpublished), diaries, poems, juvenilia, parerga, drawings and designs in 42 beautifully crafted volumes. It's quite an undertaking - and a very exciting one.
The project will revolutionise Waugh studies and influence twentieth-century literary and cultural studies more broadly too. The expert editors of our new volumes will place Waugh’s works within their rich literary and historical context, enabling us to greatly expand our knowledge of the range and complexity of Waugh's thinking and artistic practice, linking this to the work of his contemporaries in Britain, America and Europe. No other edition of a British novelist has been undertaken on this scale.
Our editors have been given permission by the Evelyn Waugh Estate to quote freely from the writer's published and unpublished materials, a privilege never before available to Waugh scholars.
The Complete Works project was initiated by Alexander Waugh, Waugh's grandson, who curates the massive Evelyn Waugh Archive at his home in Somerset. Alexander is the edition's General Editor. Professor David Bradshaw and I then became involved as Co-Executive Editors, submitting a successful bid to the Arts and Humanities Research Council to support the work.
As I am Principal Investigator, the project is based at the University of Leicester. Cutting-edge digital humanities technology, driven by our Research Associate Dr Barbara Cooke, is at the heart of what we are doing, using this website as a research tool and global seminar space for our editors, Waugh students and enthusiasts alike. Anyone who has anything to add to Waugh's story is encouraged to use the Waugh Forum and comment on the project blog, Waugh and Words. We have also pulled together the best Waugh resources on the web, and are working on some new ones ourselves, in order to make the best range of research and study materials available in one place. Back in the physical world, the International Conference 2015, the Book Club, and all our Project Partner events over the next four years are open to the public.
In my early years at Leicester I edited Evelyn Waugh: The Critical Heritage (1984), and wrote a two-volume biography of Waugh (1986, 1992). Since then I've worked on other authors - Ford Madox Ford and Muriel Spark in particular - but it is a great delight to return to Waugh and we hope that all those who become involved with this research, at whatever level, will find equal pleasure in his writing. No matter how well-read you are in Evelyn Waugh, you're bound to discover reams of new material in our planned edition. Those unpublished letters and unexpurgated diaries might cause quite a stir. Watch out for the first volumes in 2016 to mark the 50th anniversary of Waugh's death.
Although work proper on the edition began in 2009, the groundwork was laid a long time before and the project is in many ways the culmination of half a century of Waugh studies. In 1967 Paul. A. Doyle published the first Evelyn Waugh Newsletter, which year by year amassed details of all the primary and secondary Evelyn Waugh material its contributors could find. This project could not be possible without the work of Doyle and his colleagues, particularly Robert Murray Davis and Donat Gallagher, who are now editors on our new edition of The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.
Martin Stannard
Professor of Modern English Literature
School of English
University of Leicester
"A first edition copy of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies (1930), complete with its original dust jacket, made $18,750 at Swann Auction Galleries in New York on November 18, surpassing its $9,000 estimate by 108.3%.
'In 1930, he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church, and after the war married into a delightful family of that faith, the Herberts. Thenceforth, he settled down to elaborate his impersonation of a crusty old country gentleman, collecting the requisite properties, both personal and household, and occasionally appearing in London in this role. Mr. J. B. Priestley and others have complained about the impersonation on the ground that the writer has been suffocated by the elaborate superstructure it has required. This seems to me absurd for two reasons—firstly, that Mr. Waugh remains an excellent writer, probably the most accomplished today in the English language, and, secondly, that his impersonation of a country gentleman is as integral a part of his writing as was George Orwell’s equally absurd converse impersonation of a down-and-out.'
“I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St. James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime and, that day, as at Paillard’s with Rex Mottram years before, it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.” 
"There's only one great evil in the world today. Despair.” 
'To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.'
'It seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence.'
'...It is a little shy wine like a gazelle.'
