Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh: Edmund Campion Volume 17

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of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation, and a full account of each text's manuscript development and textual variants.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

Evelyn Waugh originally wrote his Edmund Campion to thank Martin D'Arcy, SJ, and to help with the building of Campion Hall, but his experience of Communist oppression in Mexico and Croatia transformed his understanding of Campion's life, revealing Campion less as an Elizabethan martyr than as part of 'the unending war' between the church and the totalitarian state. Waugh wrote a passionate new 'Preface' for the American edition of 1946 and made important changes to each of the three subsequent editions, culminating in the beautiful third edition of 1961. This new edition provides extensive biographical and contextual notes to help the reader unfamiliar with early modern history and records the many manuscript revisions and the book's reception both sides of the Atlantic. The introduction explores the personal impact of Waugh's friendship with the Asquith and Herbert families and examines the cultural context of a brief period of confidence for English Catholicism, energized by the canonization process (in which Waugh's own daughters were involved), which coincided with the publication of the five editions of the book from 1935 to 1961. Waugh received the Hawthornden Prize for the book just before he took part in the opening of Campion Hall; the book offered him a Jesuit hearth in the 'household of the faith' and gave a new theological direction to his writing, characterized by Brideshead Revisited, Helena, The Sword of Honour trilogy, and Ronald Knox. The book emerges as one of the best objets d'Arcy, which Waugh continued to give to friends till his death.

Evelyn Waugh

Gerard Kilroy, has an MA from Magdalen College, Oxford in both Classics and English. After a PhD at Lancaster, his first book was on the circulation of manuscripts connected with Campion. He won a prize from English Literary Renaissance for his 'Advertising the Reader: Sir John Harington's 'Directions in the Margent' (2011), a study of the role of the queen's godson in subversive publishing in manuscript and print. His biography of Edmund Campion, A Scholarly Life used many recently discovered manuscripts in Prague and Cieszyn, Poland, to provide a meticulously researched picture of Campion's life. He lectures on religious ideas and biblical sources in Shakespeare.

Introduction
Edmund Campion
Appendix A: Contextual Notes
Appendix B: Manuscript Development and Textual Variants
Appendix C: Biographical Notes
Appendix D: 'Preface to American Edition'
Appendix E: Chronological Bibliography