Julia Flyte is the beautiful and mercurial belle of the Flyte clan in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited.As a young woman, at first seemingly unconcerned with the normal mores of Society life, she finds herself enmeshed in them despite herself, when the reality of life for a female Catholic becomes manifest, that is, that she might be lucky to find herself a second or third son of a noble family. A solution appears to present itself when she comes into the ambit of Rex Mottram, a Canadian businessman of uncertain provenance, who appears to be becoming someone of importance in British politics. She sees him as escape from the clutches of her family, and he sees her as the pathway to the connections in Britain's upper echelons he needs to advance his career. After a farcical attempt on Rex's behalf to convert to Catholicism, an earlier marriage and divorce are discovered, and Julia breaks with her family and her faith in order to marry Rex by Anglican rites. All the stuffy people stayed away - you know, the Anchorages, and Chasms and Vanbrughs. And I thought, 'Thank God for that, they always looked down their noses at me.' But Rex was furious! Because it was just them he wanted, apparently. To her intense disappointment, married life with Rex merely reveals him to be a shallow shell of a man - He wasn't a complete human being at all, he was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed After a miscarriage and a disastrous affair, Julia encounters her brother's friend Charles Ryder on an Atlantic crossing, and in the course of a storm, they become lovers. Indeed, they fall deeply in love. They continue their affair for two years or more until finally they can each finalise their divorces and marry each other. Just as these matters are coming to a head, however, her father, the Marquess of Marchmain, returns home to die at his family seat Brideshead Castle. And during the tense period of his lordship's last weeks, Julia realises that she has, after all, retained her Catholic religious beliefs, and she can no longer contemplate marrying Charles, for all that he is clearly her soulmate. After the trauma of her father's death, at which she, finally, had been instrumental in getting a priest to adminster the last rites, she bids a tearful farewell to Charles. Although it had been Lord Marchmain's intention to break the entail which would necessitate leaving Brideshead to his eldest son, and to leave it to Julia and Charles, who would soon be married, now she inherited it solely to herself.When Charles revisits Brideshead in 1944, Brideshead Castle has been requisitioned as Brigade Headquarters by the army, and he hears from Nanny Hawkins that Julia is serving alongside Cordelia, in one of the women's military services (possibly the WAAF or the ATS), probably in Palestine. She has reverted to her maiden name, and is now known as Lady Julia Flyte. Show less «