How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
When I first met her, when she met me in the station yard and drove me home through the twilight that high summer of 1923, she was just eighteen and fresh from her first London season.
Some said it was the most brilliant season since the war, that things were getting into their stride again. Julia, by right, was at the centre of it. […] the ball given for Julia […] was by all accounts a splendid spectacle. Sebastian went down for it and half-heartedly suggested my coming with him; I refused and came to regret my refusal, for it was the last ball of its kind given there; the last of a splendid series. (1.7.3-5)
Many critics have commented on Brideshead’s seeming nostalgia for aristocracy. Charles recognizes that the days of opulence and classism are coming to a close, and he fittingly places Julia right in the center of it. She is the symbol of beauty from a former time – not unlike the idea of her as a quattrocento beauty.
Quote #5
She outshone by far all the girls of her age, but she knew that, in that little world within a world which she inhabited, there were certain grave disabilities from which she suffered. […] There was the scandal of her father; they had all loved him in the past, the women along the wall, and they most of them loved her mother, yet there was that slight, inherited stain upon her brightness that seemed deepened by something in her own way of life – waywardness and willfulness, a less disciplined habit than most of her contemporaries' – that unfitted her for the highest honours; but for that, who knows? (1.7.13)
Remember Charles and Cordelia’s discussion of the word "thwarted"? This is what Julia is – all unfulfilled potential. Interestingly enough, Charles finds her all the more beautiful for this reason.
Quote #6
As it seemed to her, the thing was a dead loss. If she apostatized now, having been brought up in the Church, she would go to hell, while the Protestant girls of her acquaintance, schooled in happy ignorance, could marry eldest sons, live at peace with their world, and get to heaven before her. There could be no eldest son for her, and younger sons were indelicate things, necessary, but not to be much spoken of. […] There were of course the Catholics themselves, but these came seldom into the little world Julia had made for herself; those who did were her mother's kinsmen, who, to her, seemed grim and eccentric. Of the dozen or so wealthy and noble Catholic families, none at that time had an heir of the right age. Foreigners – there were many among her mother's family – were tricky about money, odd in their ways, and a sure mark of failure in the English girl who wed them. What was there left? (1.7.16)
Religion and class concerns run Julia’s life and restricts her choices, the same as it does for Sebastian.