The adaptation focuses on the Dashwood sisters, who face financial hardships after their father's death and relocate to a Devon cottage. Their Aunt Jennings is eager to secure husbands for them in London, leading to a blend of romance and social maneuvering. This streamlined version captures the original's irony and spirit while offering a fast-paced and easily staged experience, featuring a cast of three women and two men or two women and men.
Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century and called "Evelyn Waugh's finest achievement" by the New York Times , Brideshead Revisited is a stunning exploration of desire, duty, and memory set in the years just before World War Two. The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece--a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire. Through the story of Charles Ryder's entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh's early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.