![]() The book is rightly dedicated to Fr Martin D’Arcy SJ (1888–1976), the charismatic Master of Campion Hall: it was D’Arcy who suggested the subject to Waugh in 1934. Edmund Campion is a book that evolved through six editions (including the Penguin) over 25 years: a brief period of confidence for English Catholicism, finally free to acclaim publicly its Henrician and Elizabethan martyrs after four centuries of politically tactful silence. When Longmans published the third, and by far the most elegant, English edition in 1961, with a woodcut by Reynolds Stone, the process for canonising Campion and the other Forty Martyrs was on the final straight Margaret, Waugh’s favourite daughter, was helping Fr Philip Caraman SJ, the Vice-Postulator, at Farm Street. Thomas More and John Fisher were canonised by Pope Pius XI on in the same month, Evelyn Waugh finished writing his gripping account of Edmund Campion. ![]() ![]() How did the patron saint of the Jesuits in Britain, who was martyred on 1 December 1581, transform the life of one England’s most celebrated authors nearly 400 years later? Gerard Kilroy, the co-editor of a new edition of Evelyn Waugh's Edmund Campion, describes the motivations behind and evolution of Waugh’s ‘work of imaginative literature’. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |