Fictional Country Houses of the 1980s: Isabel Colegate, Kazuo Ishiguro, and V.S. Naipaul

Abstract

The renewed interest in English country houses in the 1980s was part of a focus on the idea of “English heritage,” and it was accompanied by a flourishing of historical novels and costume dramas. In the twenty-first century, scholars have investigated the links between country houses and the British Empire. A careful reading of Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party (1980), Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1988), and V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) shows that these writers took a critical view of the myth of the English country house. Each of them in some way addresses the colonial and imperial connections of the country house, and they each extend a venerable literary tradition in a manner that addresses the concerns of the late twentieth century and anticipates those of the twenty-first. The three novelists make use of a variety of perspectives in their representation of the country house, with significant attention to the experience of servants. Colegate writes out of a personal knowledge of the upper class from her own family background, while Ishiguro and Naipaul are English writers who were born in other parts of the world, giving them distinctive standpoints from which to consider English history and society.