The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: A Little Learning: Volume 19

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh offers the first scholarly edition of Waugh's work, bringing together all of his extant writings and graphic art: novels, biographies, travel writing, short fiction, essays, articles, reportage, reviews, poems, juvenilia, parerga, drawings, and designs. No other edition of a British novelist has been undertaken on this scale. Only 15% of Waugh's letters have previously been published. Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson, is editing a twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence for the series, intercalating over 10,000 letters with the complete, unexpurgated diaries. All volumes will be beautifully produced, and have comprehensive introductions and detailed annotation. Fiction and non-fiction volumes will also contain a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants.

The Complete Works will revolutionize Waugh studies, and offer new insights for twentieth-century literary and cultural studies generally. Waughs works are placed in their rich literary and historical context, enabling readers to appreciate for the first time the range and complexity of his thinking and artistic practice, and linking this to the work of his contemporaries in Britain, America and Europe.

This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants. The edition's General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence.

In a writing career populated with characters and situations drawn closely from life, A Little Learning is unique. It is Waugh's only finished, book-length work of autobiography, describing his ancestors and early childhood before arriving at boarding school in the South Downs and the Oxford University experiences that inspired his best-known work, Brideshead Revisited (1945). A Little Learning was intended to be the first of three autobiographical volumes, but Waugh died before more than a fragment of its successor, A Little Hope, was completed, making A Little Learning his last book.

In this new critical edition, John Howard Wilson and Barbara Cooke lay out the complex literary and cultural inheritance of A Little Learning, and discuss the circumstances of its composition in a rapidly changing world from which Waugh felt increasingly isolated. For the first time, all the surviving fragments of A Little Hope are reproduced in full, and the volume brings together all Waugh's major radio, TV, and magazine interviews which span his thirty-year career.