Black Mischief

Black Mischief is Evelyn Waugh's third novel, published in 1932. Expanded from a novella, 'Seth', the novel chronicles the efforts of the British-educated Emperor Seth, assisted by a fellow Oxford University graduate, Basil Seal, to modernise his Empire, the fictional African island of Azania, located in the Indian Ocean off the eastern coast of Africa. The novel was written while Waugh was a house guest at Madresfield Court in Worcestershire. The old nursery had been converted into a writing room for Waugh. The novel is dedicated to the Lygon sisters, who had the run of the place (their father, William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, having been forced into exile in 1931 under threat of prosecution for his homosexuality), and posed for some of the drawings Waugh did for the first edition. When Black Mischief was published in 1932, the editor of the Catholic journal The Tablet, Ernest Oldmeadow, launched a violent attack on the book and its author, stating that the novel was "a disgrace to anybody professing the Catholic name". Waugh, wrote Oldmeadow, "was intent on elaborating a work outrageous not only to Catholic but to ordinary standards of modesty". Waugh made no public rebuttal of these charges; an open letter to the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster was prepared, but on the advice of Waugh's friends was not sent. The novel has been published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Classics (ISBN 9780141183985), and in the United States by Back Bay Books (ISBN 0316917338).