The scandal surrounding
The Loom of Youth (1917), Alec Waugh's novel about boarding-school life, had made Evelyn unwelcome at Sherborne. From Lancing, Waugh went on to Hertford College, Oxford, on a scholarship in 1922. He left without a degree in 1924, briefly attended art school in London, and then took low-paying teaching jobs at schools in North Wales and Buckinghamshire. The success of his biography of the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, published in 1928, made it possible for him to marry Evelyn Gardner on 27 June of that year; their friends called her "She-Evelyn." That fall she became seriously ill with German measles. With the proceeds from Waugh's
Decline and Fall: An Illustrated Novelette (1928) and some published articles, they went on a Mediterranean cruise from February to May 1929 to help her recuperate. Instead, her health worsened during the early part of the trip. That summer she left Waugh for another man.
For his first travel book, Labels: A Mediterranean Journal (1930), Waugh revised material from the diaries he had kept while traveling with his wife in 1929. On completing the work he destroyed the diaries.
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