Isabel Colegate, born in 1931, may well be the greatest living English novelist, and yet many readers have never heard of her. Nevertheless, she has always attracted discriminating admirers. Her best-known book is The Shooting Party (1980), set in an Oxfordshire country house in 1913 and adapted into a 1985 film starring James Mason, John Gielgud, Dorothy Tutin, and Gordon Jackson, who played Upstairs Downstairs’s Hudson. A little before, in 1984, Penguin published two paperback collections, one her first three novels (The Blackmailer, The Man of Power, and The Great Occasion), the second the Orlando Trilogy, originally published separately as Orlando King (1968), Orlando at the Brazen Threshold (1972), and Agatha (1973). New, elegantly written, trim books by Colegate regularly appeared throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Her most recent book, published in 2002, is her one full-length venture into nonfiction, A Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits, Solitaries and Recluses. For several years, most of her books other than The Shooting Party have been out of print. Now, Bloomsbury has produced a new edition of the Orlando Trilogy, the third paperback version (the second was published in 1996 by Virago), this time under the name of the first novel in the series, Orlando King.1

The trilogy is based on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex trilogy, the names anglicized and the settings adapted to Brittany, England, and Tuscany in the first half of the twentieth century and into the 1950s—the time