A Handful of Dust
Handful of Dust, A,a novel by E. Waugh , published 1934 .
It describes the infatuation of Lady Brenda Last with an idle, parasitic young man-about-town, John Beaver, which leads her to neglect her ‘madly feudal’ husband Tony, her son, and her country home of Hetton. When her son is killed in a hunting accident, Brenda leaves Tony, expecting him to grant her a divorce, but after an ‘arranged’ visit to Brighton to acquire evidence of adultery Tony realizes that he will lose Hetton if he meets Brenda's alimony demands. He departs instead up the Amazon, where he is rescued from the brink of death by the old mad recluse Mr Todd, and consigned to a fate of reading Dickens aloud forever to his host, who keeps him captive. Hetton passes to cousins and Brenda is remarried, but not to Beaver. The epigraph and title are from The Waste Land , and although the novel resembles Waugh's earlier comic works, it has also been...
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