Isabel Colegate
Highly rated author of The Shooting Party and other novels, whose work was not easy to pigeonhole
ISABEL COLEGATE, who has died aged 91, was the author of 13 novels, including The Shooting Party (1980), an elegiac and highly acclaimed portrayal of a rapidly disappearing world of Edwardian privilege, set on the eve of the First World War; in 1984 it was made into an award-winning film by Alan Bridges, with an all-star cast led by James Mason as the lord of the manor, Edward Fox as a difficult guest and John Gielgud as a bannerwaving animal-rights campaigner.
The book’s thesis was that “an age, perhaps a civilisation, is coming to an end” and the director and screenwriter Julian Fellowes cited The Shooting Party as the key influence on Gosford Park and Downton Abbey. It won the 1981 WH Smith Literary Award.
Isabel Colegate was fascinated by the shifting sands of class, how people negotiate their way through cataclysmic social change and learn to deal with the ghosts of the past. Yet her work was not easy to pigeonhole and for many years much of it remained out of print.
For while the narrative of The Shooting Party revolved around one weekend, her “Orlando King” trilogy, written in the 1960s and 1970s – and reissued in one volume in 2020 – was a strange, dreamlike retelling of Sophocles’s Theban plays. It featured the rise and fall of a young capitalist caught up in the tide of history from Appeasement through the Second World War to the Suez Crisis.
Modest and good-natured, Isabel Colegate was philosophical about the ups and downs of her literary career. “My books have come and gone,” she told the i newspaper in 2020. “It’s no good worrying about what happens to them.”
Isabel Diana Colegate was born in Lincolnshire on September 10 1931, the youngest of four daughters of Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Colegate and Winifred, née Worsley, the daughter of a baronet and widow of an Army officer killed in action in the First World War.
Arthur Colegate had started out as a socialist and a had been close to Beatrice and Sidney Webb. But after periods in the Civil Service and in business, he joined the Conservatives, serving as MP for The Wrekin from 1941 to 1945, then for Burton from 1950 to 1955.
Isabel and her sisters spent much of their childhood at Bembridge on the Isle of Wight, and early in the war went to stay with their uncle Sir Marcus Worsley and cousins at Hovingham Hall, Yorkshire. When their father entered Parliament they moved to Shropshire.
Isabel was sent to Runton Hill School, a girls’ boarding school in Norfolk, but claimed to have had “no education at all”. Her first job, from 1952, was with Anthony Blond, with whom she set up the Anthony Blond literary agency. She had met him through Michael Briggs, a dashingly handsome commodity trader whom she would marry in 1953.
When Blond set up his own publishing house, one of the first books he issued was Isabel Colegate’s debut novel, The Blackmailer (1958), a satirical story of power and class obsession set in the cut-throat world of the 1950s Fleet Street literary scene. It was described by one reviewer as combining “the slightly offbeat sensibility of Muriel Spark with the milieu of an Iris Murdoch novel”. The Daily Telegraph praised it as “flowing and unpretentious”.
In 1961 the Briggses bought Midford Castle, a Strawberry Hill Gothic country house near Bath which they worked to restore and where they brought up their three children. In partnership with Jeremy Fry of the chocolate family, Michael Briggs built up a thriving engineering firm and he went on to serve as a successful chairman of the Bath Preservation Trust. The couple also had a home in London and for many years a farmhouse in Tuscany.
As her children were growing up, for many years Isabel Colegate confined her writing to school terms. “My work has always had to fit in with everything else,” she told the Evening
Standard in 1991. “Fitting in is what women do.”
The Blackmailer was followed by two more novels focusing on life and social mores in England after the Second World War. A Man of Power (1960), depicting a newly rich businessman who abandons his wife but is duped by the aristocrat with whom he has fallen in love, was followed by the partly autobiographical The Great Occasion (1962). All three were later republished by Penguin in an omnibus volume.
Statues in a Garden (1964), about the disastrous ramifications of an affair between a young man and his aunt, was set in the same doomed upperclass Edwardian milieu that would form the backdrop to The Shooting Party. Her trilogy, Orlando King (1968),
Orlando at the Brazen Threshold (1971)
and Agatha (1973), was followed by
News from the City of the Sun (1979), a novel set in a utopian commune which won modest reviews.
Among her other novels, Deceits of Time (1988) concerned a small-time English writer who finds that her work on a biography of a minor politician threatens to disclose some dark political and personal secrets.
In The Summer of the Royal Visit (1991), a retired history professor in an unnamed city ruminates about a group of 19th-century inhabitants whose destinies became intertwined one summer, in a plot involving death, seduction, attempted suicide, blackmail and, as one reviewer put it, “revelations of sordid sexual practices”.
Her last novel, Winter Journey (1995), delved into the relationship between an aging brother and sister who reminisce about the past and the separate roads their lives have taken during a few quiet days together at their childhood home.
Isabel Colegate’s last book, A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses (2002), was an idiosyncratic history of the human quest for solitude, ranging from St Simeon Stylites to the millionaire recluse Howard Hughes. It was inspired by her excavation and restoration of a Augustan Age hermit’s cell in a wood near Midford Castle.
In 2006 she and her husband sold the castle and moved to Mells in Somerset, where they built a comfortable modern home and where in later years Isabel (who listed her recreations in Who’s Who as “walking the dog”) doted on her terrier, Daisy.
Isabel Colegate also reviewed books for the Telegraph, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Her husband Michael Briggs died in 2017. She is survived by two sons and a daughter.