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part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants.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.

About the Author
John Howard Wilson was the founder of the Evelyn Waugh society and served on the Advisory Board of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project. Barbara Cooke received a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia in 2013 and became Research Associate for the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh project the same year. As well as her forthcoming Evelyn Waugh's Oxford (Bodleian Publishing), Dr Cooke has written on travelogues, twentieth century (auto)biography, and power struggles in the post-colonial world.

Reviews
The inclusion of the interviews is a much welcome addition to the book. If the other volumes come up to the standards achieved in this one, the project will be a major scholarly success. * Jeffrey Manley, EVELYN WAUGH STUDIES *
exemplary [...] If these initial offerings (Volumes two, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-six and thirty) are an indicator of things to come, then the edition will justify its grandiose claim to "revolutionize Waugh studies" [...] It will indeed become one of the great monuments of twenty-first-century literary scholarship. * Paula Byrne, Times Literary Supplement *
a welcome opportunity to look again at [Waugh's] evolution as a writer and thinke...These volumes reveal different aspects of Waugh's youthful plasticity and show how his adult persona developed as he tested himself as a write [...] a major event in Waugh scholarship, and...an essential research resource for many years to come. * Lisa Mullen, Worcester College, Oxford, Essays in Criticism *
As a scholarly treatment of a modern British novelist, The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh looks as if it will stand in a class of its own, not only for its presentation of definitive texts but also for its patient accumulation of large amounts of personal material that have hitherto escaped the biographers' gaze. * D.J Taylor, Literary Review *
A must read. * David Sexton, Evening Standard *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198702917
Author Evelyn Waugh
Format Hardback
Page Count 688
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 908g
Dimensions(mm) 223mm * 160mm * 41mm