Lost Evelyn Waugh letters reveal thwarted love for 'bright young thing'
Grandson recovers lost correspondence between Evelyn Waugh and Teresa 'Baby' Jungman
by Dalya Alberge, The Observer, Sunday 21 July 2013
She was known as Teresa “Baby” Jungman, a beauty among the bohemian “bright young things” of 1920s English society, whose high-class hedonism inspired Evelyn Waugh to write Vile Bodies. She was also the unrequited love of Waugh's life, and the recipient of a huge number of letters from the author which, seven years after her death at the age of 102, are finally to be published.
A 42-volume edition of the complete writings of Waugh is being put together by his grandson, Alexander, who is heading a team preparing one of the largest ever scholarly editions devoted to a British author. The volumes, to be published by Oxford University Press, will include unpublished passages from Waugh's novels and thousands of previously unseen letters.
A star attraction will be the previously unseen letters to Jungman, who has also been seen as an inspiration for the character of Lady Julia Flyte, the glamorous but tragic heroine of his best-known novel, Brideshead Revisited. For decades Jungman claimed that the letters had been destroyed, but shortly before she died she invited Alexander Waugh to her home in Dublin and, to his astonishment, offered him access.