‘Will Future Editor Kindly Omit...’: Evelyn Waugh in Conversation with His Archives

The archive of English writer Evelyn Waugh is gaining increased scholarly attention. In particular, his library of books and habits of reading are scrutinised by book historians while textual scholars attend to his manuscripts. Multiple archives house Waugh material and collections are constantly growing worldwide: the past five years, for example, have recovered a series of Waugh’s personal engagement diaries as well as several previously unknown or unidentified artworks.

While Waugh has largely been a marginal figure in modernist studies, his archive reveals the extent of his engagement with modernity and modernism, including the network of personal and professional relationships that linked Waugh with his modernist contemporaries.  

This essay attends to three key components of the archive in Waugh scholarship. It maps the rich manuscript materials available to scholars, highlights Waugh’s own consideration towards bibliographic matter and interest in preservation, and emphasises the centrality of textual criticism in Waugh studies.