Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder is a novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1945. Waugh wrote that the novel "deals with what is theologically termed 'the operation of Grace', that is to say, the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to Himself". This is achieved by an examination of the aristocratic Flyte family, as seen by the narrator, Charles Ryder. After an unpleasant chance first encounter, protagonist and narrator Charles Ryder, a student at an unnamed Oxford University college (though critics have suggested Waugh used Hertford College as his model; in the television series Charles Ryder wears a St Edmund Hall tie), and Lord Sebastian Flyte, the younger son of an aristocratic family and himself an undergraduate at Christ Church, become friends. Sebastian takes Charles to his family's palatial home, Brideshead Castle, where Charles eventually meets the rest of the Flyte family, including Sebastian's sister, Lady Julia Flyte. During the holiday Charles returns home, where he lives with his father. Scenes between Charles and his father Ned (Edward) provide some of the best-known comic scenes in the novel. During the holiday he is called back to Brideshead after Sebastian incurs a minor injury. Sebastian and Charles spend the remainder of the summer together. Sebastian's family is Catholic, but only first generation: Lord Marchmain, an Anglican, converted to his wife's religion, Roman Catholicism. Religious considerations arise frequently among the family, and Catholicism influences their lives as well as the content of their conversations, all of which surprises Charles, who had always assumed Christianity to be "without substance or merit." Charles is also put off religion by Lady Marchmain, Sebastian's mother, a devout Catholic who tries to control others through guilt and manipulation. Sebastian, in some ways a troubled young man, learns to find greater solace in alcohol than in religion, and descends into that habit, drifting away from the family over a two-year period, which occasions Charles' own estrangement from the Flytes. Yet Charles is fated to re-encounter the Flyte family over the years, and eventually forms a relationship with Julia, who by that time is married but separated from the wealthy but uncouth Canadian entrepreneur, Rex Mottram. Charles plans to divorce his own wife — who has been unfaithful — so he and Julia can marry. However, motivated by a comment by her brother and by her father's deathbed return to the faith, Julia decides that she can no longer live in sin, and for that reason can no longer contemplate marriage to Charles. Lord Marchmain's reception of the sacrament of Extreme Unction also influences Charles, who had been "in search of love in those days" when he first met Sebastian, "that low door in the wall...which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden," a metaphor that informs the work on a number of levels. Waugh desired that the book should be about the "operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters." During the Second World War, Ryder, now an army officer after establishing a career as an architectural artist, is billeted at Brideshead, once home to many of his affections. It occurs to him that builders' efforts were not in vain, even when their purposes may appear, for a time, to be frustrated.

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