SOURCE: “‘Bella Fleace Gave a Party’ or, The Archetypal Image of Waugh's Sense of Decay,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 15, No. 1, Winter, 1978, pp. 69–73.

In the following essay, Blayac argues that as a metaphor for changing social conditions “Bella Fleace Gave a Party” ranks among Waugh's best works of short fiction.

In his somewhat controversial biography of Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Sykes tentatively discards some of the writer's early novels as uneven and immature;¹ he is even more censorious of the short stories which, except for “Mr. Loveday's Little Outing” and “Period Piece,” he repeatedly finds fault with.² They are, he suggests, repetitive, impersonal, and occasionally marred by too close an imitation of well-known stories or writers. As a case in point, Mr. Sykes writes that “Bella Fleace Gave a Party”³ “is supposed to be based on an incident which did actually happen: an ambitious hostess, it was related...