Helena is a surprising anomaly in Waugh's oeuvre – a semifictional hagiography set in the third and fourth century AD. It is defiantly subtitled ‘A Novel’, and has only a notional affinity to his other devotional lives of Campion, Jesuit and Martyr (1935), and his contemporary, Ronald Knox (1959).

Though the third shortest of Waugh's fictions, Helena had the longest gestation. He had already started work on it when Brideshead was published in late May 1945. On 1 May his diary notes: ‘The end of war is hourly expected. Mussolini obscenely murdered, continual rumours that Hitler's mind has finally gone […] I will now get to work on St Helena.’ Five days later his next entry claims, rather prematurely, ‘I have done enough reading to start tomorrow on Helena […] I thank God to find myself still a writer and at work on something as ‘‘uncontemporary’’ as I am’ (D 627). A lot more reading was done before he published Helena in 1950.

The chronology of Waugh's individual works was becoming increasingly tangled. Helena was interrupted by the failed negotiations for Brideshead's film-rights (1947), the writing of The Loved One (1948), the rewriting of Work Suspended (1949), a novella, two short stories, and numerous trips abroad. Most tellingly, in September 1945 Waugh was sidetracked from Helena by an appalled rereading of his school diaries, which prompted the novel-fragment, Charles Ryder's Schooldays. Like Helena, this was an escape from the horrors of a dying war, which now included the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ‘News from the outside world becomes more horrible daily – chaos and tyranny and famine and sheer wickedness throughout two thirds of Europe and all Asia […] I have begun a novel of school life in 1919 – as untopical a theme as might be found’ (D 636). Both novels, the completed and the aborted, were designedly ‘uncontemporary’, ‘untopical’, but Helena, the survivor, darkly mirrored ‘many incidents in recent history’ in its level account of the monomaniac leaders, obscene murders and mass military betrayals of fourth century Rome.