Isabel Colegate's novels chart the fortunes of the moneyed classes in twentieth-century England, from the weekend shooting parties of the Edwardian aristocracy to the anachronistic antics of the upper classes in the 1950s. In doing so, the novels are also about history and the efforts of representative individuals to recognize it, to direct it, or to accommodate themselves to it. Her books are equally about myth, and the shifting relationship between history and myth governs their development and constitutes her importance as a contemporary novelist.

Colegate grew up in Lincolnshire, the youngest child of Sir Arthur Colegate and Lady Colegate Worsley. After being taught at home by governesses she went to boarding school, but because, as she has remarked, she "never quite got the hang of being taught," she left at sixteen. At nineteen she went to work as an assistant for literary agent Anthony Blond. In 1953 Colegate...