Back on the bookshelf
LUCY LETHBRIDGE admires the author Isabel Colegate’s skill at recreating so vividly the atmosphere of the past
The author Isabel Colegate, who was 89 this year, is the author of 14 books, 13 of them novels. Her first, published in 1958, was The
Blackmailer (in the process of being not only reprinted but made into a film) and her last one, which appeared in 2002, was also her only non-fiction: a study of hermits and solitaries called A Pelican in the Wilderness.
But Colegate’s best known novel is probably The Shooting Party, published in 1980. Set in a grand Edwardian country house in 1913 where guests have assembled for a shooting weekend, it returns to the prevailing theme of almost all Colegate’s novels: a society on the edge of change. For the modern reader, who knows what is looming in 1914, how the bubble in which these privileged characters exist will be so violently burst, the descriptions of the autumnal meadowlands of Sir Randolph Nettleby’s Oxfordshire estate and the mannered conversations in the drawing room of Nettleby Park are equally unsettling. This world will be as destroyed by the Great War for young James, the beater who lays traps for rabbits with his skinny silent colly bitch (‘a perfect poacher’s dog’), as for Lionel Stephens, the brilliant up-andcoming barrister who is one of Sir Randolph’s guests.
When in 1984 The Shooting Party was made into a film, the lead roles went to James Mason as Sir Randolph and John Gielgud as Cornelius Cardew, the antibloodsports campaigner: they were themselves then representatives of their own pre-war golden age, an elegy within an elegy.
The Daily Telegraph reviewer called The Shooting Party ‘Stylish, funny and infinitely subtle. It is as vivid and brilliant as a painting on glass.’ Colegate is a very specific writer, her descriptions based on precise and careful observation, polished without being at all shiny. Her skill at recreating so keenly the manners, feelings and atmosphere of this particular moment of the historical past must have been in part due to the fact that she had been born in its shadow in 1931. If the conversation and language in The Shooting Party feel authentic and unstrained, it is because her characters speak like characters she has encountered: she will have met a real Edwardian. She has a sharp, unsnobbish eye for class distinctions now almost completely gone or at least radically changed. She told Rachel Cooke that she was glad those divisions have now gone: ‘There is still all sorts of snobbery, in all sorts of directions, but not like in those days.’
Colegate was the youngest of the four daughters of Sir Arthur Colegate, who was a Tory MP, and they were brought up in a large house in Shropshire where her father’s constituency was The Wrekin. She was interviewed widely this year to mark the reprinting by Bloomsbury of her Orlando King trilogy and she told Lucy Scholes of inews that although she was never a rebel, she had always felt on the outside of her parents’ world – the ideal place as it turned out for a novelist to be: ‘I have always wanted to stand aside and look at things, if only to myself.’
The Orlando novels, written in the late 1960s and early 70s, begin with the hunger marches of the 1930s and work from pre-war Britain through conflict to post-war Cold War, ending in the Suez Crisis. The trilogy is a re-working of the Oedipus myth, starting with her handsome, charismatic protagonist Orlando King’s arrival in London and charting his rise to power – and finally his fall: ‘I put a lot of emotion into those three books,’ she told Cooke, who asked her whether the novels had a particular resonance today. ‘I found myself possessed by the story. I was extraordinarily interested in the history of that time – the period after the war – and with all the ways in which life changed. Perhaps it’s that as time goes on, people seem to get more interested in that period not less. This is curious. It’s possible that its importance is still sinking in.’
Colegate didn’t go to university (‘I have no education at all’) but instead, in the early 1950s, went to work for the publisher Anthony Blond in a ‘little back room’ in London. It was an exciting time and she found that Blond trusted her intuitive taste and judgement on books and their authors. Together they found and published several ‘eccentric’ figures who had had an exciting war, escaping for example from prisoner of war camps. Perhaps it honed too the interest so evident in Colegate’s fiction of the high drama and intensity of huge shared events like war.
Through Blond, she met Michael Briggs, the chairman of the Bath Preservation Trust. They were married in 1961 and together spent decades renovating Midford Castle, a glorious 18th-century gingerbread Gothick folly. (And which, marking another twisty corner in the tunnel of 20th-century social change in Britain, they sold to the Hollywood star Nicholas Cage in 2007.). Colegate produced a novel every few years but, in the self-deprecating style of her pre-war generation, has firmly resisted any temptation to get precious about the business of being a writer. ‘I don’t think you go about feeling proud of your own books,’ she told Cooke firmly. ‘You just hope for the best. Then again you don’t want to start thinking: I wonder if I could have done it better. Because then you’d get terribly depressed.’
Colegate had always felt on the outside of her parents’ world