Evelyn Waugh's Helena is outstanding as the first and only representation to draw an explicit causal connection between her legendary British origins and her success in finding the Cross. In this regard, his is the most extreme deployment of the legend within patriotic discourse. Waugh was working with his own fictional and theological agendas, but the way he embraces and elaborates the portrait of a British Helena illuminates the rhetorical power of this image when it integrates hagiographical and historiographical traditions with floating narrative elements from popular tales. Waugh is also the first redactor of the legend to concentrate on Helena as an individual, independent of her relationship with Constantine, Pope Silvester, Magnus Maximus, or the Cross, though her role in the Inventio is a major focus of his novel. Unlike earlier accounts of this event, Waugh creates a fictional depiction of the emotional and spiritual background and impact of this event on his subject. His portrait of Helena's psychological life contrasts sharply with the purely symbolic value of her story in earlier manifestations, and here we can identify variant literary strategies in dealing with the cult of personality: medieval and early-modern writers invoke a range of traditions associated with a name whereas the twentieth-century novelist fashions a psyche for the character. These essential differences between the modern and pre-modern incarnations of the legend underscore its value as a malleable entity: not only its flexibility and applicability to many cultural and generic contexts, but also its capacity for survival despite successive re-creation. Narrative manipulation seems not to have detracted from the successful transmission of the core legendary material, any more than contradictory historical and fictional accounts restricted each other’s circulation.