Reconsiderations February 2021
Isabel Colegate endures
On the eighty-nine-year-old novelist’s best books.
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...
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