Sanderson holds a master of fine arts degree in fiction writing and is an independent writer. In this essay, she examines how Waugh's novel can be read as the author's own fictionalized memories of his steps toward Catholicism and a relationship with God.

Evelyn Waugh was widely known to be a conservative man, a man who felt more comfortable with the warm burnish of tradition than with the bright shine of the modern. Most of his novels written before 1942 are considered masterworks of satire. So the critics' nearly unanimous howl in 1945 upon the publication of Brideshead Revisited - a collective complaint that Waugh had lost his spark and had gone soft - should not come as a surprise. The novel was condemned as a romance, even a fantasy, and the knock against Waugh became that he had done his best work before World War II.

But after...