The Story Archive

A Handful of Dust

Evelyn Waugh · 1934 CE · Novel · English · Modernist

A country landowner devoted to his hideous Victorian Gothic house fails to notice that his wife has taken a lover in London out of boredom, and the arrangement holds comfortably until an accident forces everyone's hand. What opens as a comedy of manners cools into something much harder as the machinery of divorce, money and family obligation grinds on. The title and epigraph come from Eliot, and the closing movement was reworked from Waugh's earlier story The Man Who Liked Dickens.

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