Statues in a Garden

by Isabel Colegate

'Just the right mixture of doomed fun, melancholy and faintly lascivious despair' Observer

'I am afraid I have something to tell you. It is that we are all about to be destroyed.'

1914. The old standards are going. There is bitterness in politics, talk of civil war in Ireland.

But all this means little to Cynthia Weston, attractive wife of cabinet member Aylmer Weston, and her nephew by marriage Philip. They are caught up in the charmed, perilous toils of a mutual passion that will destroy all they hold most dear – while the shadow of war lengthens and darkens, ready to swallow their world whole.

A captivating portrait of a lost world, Statues in a Garden is a rediscovered masterpiece by one of the most important and neglected British female writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, British Literature, 20th Century, Historical, Classics

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Isabel Colegate was born in 1931 in London and was educated at Runton Hill School in Norfolk. In 1952 she went into partnership with Anthony Blond, who was then starting a literary agency and would go on to found a publishing house, and in 1953 she married Michael Briggs, with whom she has a daughter and two sons.

Colegate’s first novel, The Blackmailer, was published by Blond in 1958 and was followed by two more novels focusing on English life in the years after the Second World War: A Man of Power (1960) and The Great Occasion (1962). These were later republished by Penguin in an omnibus volume, Three Novels, in 1983.

Though she has written a number of other successful novels, as well as reviews for the Spectator, Daily Telegraph and TLS, Colegate is best known for her bestseller and major critical success The Shooting Party (1980), which won the W.H. Smith Literary Award and was adapted for a now-classic 1985 film version. The book is still in print today (with Counterpoint in the US and as a Penguin Modern Classic in the UK). More recently, she has written the acclaimed novel Winter Journey (1995) and the non-fiction work Pelican in the Wilderness: Hermits and Solitaries (2002).

Isabel Colegate was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in1981. She and her husband live in Somerset.

Valancourt Books

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

they were like statues in a garden, the governess realized, frozen figures in an Eden out of time. a place that would soon become very different, very quickly: England before The Great War that changed everything for everyone on that island, including these aristocrats playing "statues in a garden," racing around, laughing, flirting, plotting, and then freezing in a game pose, renaming themselves Temperance and Prudence and Nature - all the things that they were not.

Colegate gets into the heads of these often pretty and always silly creatures, almost all of whom turn out to have rich, nuanced inner selves. don't we all, aristocrat and commoner alike. like the narrator, I often found myself entranced by their predictable but still startling ways. the author is, for the most part, a genius with characterization. I came to understand these at first off-putting but eventually fascinating people. especially the dragon of a grandmother, wandering in the garden at night, thinking of nature, change, and death. Colegate is a seasoned hand with prose and with tone: a lacey style threaded with irony; distance; a sadness in the air, a kind of gathering storm.

one deep flaw, but not quite a fatal one: the wayward adopted son. the author clearly loathed this miserable, vindictive, entirely toxic young man. he's everything that could be wrong in a person born privilege-adjacent. it's unfortunate that nearly all of the storylines centered this repulsive, shallowly-depicted villain. I wanted more depth to his characterization, the story needed it as well. even monsters are not monsters to themselves. when they look in the mirror, such monsters see another human being.

3.5 stars

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novella has a marvelous in media res opening during which the reader is overwhelmed by many characters, many names, many locales. The people are all chattering about God knows what, and the reader must puzzle it out. In the end it’s a story of how an angry young man leads his uncle’s prominent political family to tragedy. There’s financial shenanigans, and really good sex, which as we all know is rare on the page. It’s set in the famously hot English summer just before the Great War. Franz Ferdinand has been assassinated in Sarajevo by madman Gavrilo Princep, but the English seem to think that the crisis will blow over. In this, Colegate’s fourth novel, if I’m not mistaken, she manages a wonderful obliquity that reminds me of Virginia Woolf a bit. The book is straightforward chronologically, but it’s brilliant in its variety of voices, though all these voices come pretty much from the English gentry. There isn’t much cross-class dialect such as one gets in, say, a Kingsley Amis novel. (Amis was a loose contemporary of Colegate.) It’s a brilliant character study deserving of multiple re-readings. Literary fiction at its best. Read it.

[Troy Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fine novel by an excellent writer. I feel that Isabel Colegate should be better known and more widely read.

Statues in a Garden is the story of a wealthy, influential family in the months leading up to the First World War. It has The Go-Between and Brideshead Revisited vibes – a big country estate, secrets and lies, impending doom. For me, it perhaps isn’t quite as good as her masterpiece, The Shooting Party, but it’s not far behind.

A note about the Bloomsbury 2021 edition. I’ve never read a book so poorly proofread. It’s as if the wrong set of uncorrected proofs was accidentally sent to the printer. The amount of typos and missing punctuation is infuriating; there are more pages with errors on them than without - insulting to a writer as fine as Isabel Colegate. I hope Bloomsbury rectify this for their next reprint.

Gorgeous cover, though.
4.5 stars

[Emma Hardy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is very Muriel Spark-esque with lots of chit chat and then impending doom along the way. A real masterpiece of its time. Different feelings towards war, and different reactions within societal life. A great blend of characters with quirks, and strong personalities. Very enjoyable.

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

A more overtly sexual after the fact Woolf-lite. Actually a loving and sensitive tribute to her, with some moments that glimpse at greatness.

The atmosphere of the last moments before WWI is beautifully done, bathed in a sort of golden light that papers over the condition of women and the pernicious absurdity of a benignly obtuse rentier class. Overall, though the central plot device (a scandalous affair) did not grab me - I felt it deserved either more or less attention. There were also some clunky disquisitions on the political scene of the day.

The best parts of this book are what happen around the margins. Still I would read more of this heretofore unknown to me author.

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good. But completely let down by the number of typos in this edition.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a tense drama of manners and society set in the months before the outbreak of World War One. The narrator is one of the party of people she writes about and occasionally she breaks the narrative flow to tell you what happened to the characters involved after the book ends. You only find out who she is at the end of the book.
The use of the narrator is something I struggled with in this book. She recounts episodes she could never have been party to, which undermines her reliability somewhat and I found it a little jarring.
It is a clever, dark drama in which, rather like the war which is looming and which becomes more and more present as the book continues, the tensions of the lies that hold relationships together is brought to breaking point. A short novella which packs a much bigger emotional punch than you would think.

[Hester · Rating 4 out of 5]

By heck this is good . A last hurrah for that secure elite society of upper class England on the eve of WW1. Colgate captures the subsidence, the fissures opening up in this gilded world before the understanding of its impermanence and vulnerability has hit home .

[Justin Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not as gripping as Colegate's later novels, and especially unreadable in the recentish Bloomsbury edition, which is so badly proofread that I have a hard time believing any human so much as glanced at it before publication. Full stops are just kind of scattered at random. throughout sentences but also left out entirely you never know if a sentence has ended. or not it is like reading classical texts with. no punctuation at all except even worse because there is punctuation it is just. randomly distributed

I abandoned the novel because of this.

[Gina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I greatly enjoyed this period piece which captures the hiatus just before WW1. A family cracks at the seams, forecasting the devastation which is about to descend on them all.

[Rosemary · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1914, a politician's wife is the catalyst for events that will shatter a family as the coming war will shatter the country. I thought this would have been better told in the third person rather than having a narrator who couldn't have known all that happened - but I found it very powerful emotionally.

In the copy I read, there were a lot of missing full stops, which at first I took for an annoying feature of the writer's style. But later there were other errors, so in the end I decided they were just misprints.

[Desirae · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compelling, brisk read- very reminiscent of Somerset Maugham (particularly 'Up at the Villa') with its propulsive writing, underlying darkness, well-drawn characters, and building sense of doom. Also brings to mind L.H. Hartley's 'The Go-Between' (similar themes and timeframe) and J.L. Carr's 'A Month in the Country'. Excellent pacing and construction. Recommended for those who enjoy pre-and post-World War I English country manor dramas.

[Amie Rowe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Started off not enjoying her style of writing, however by the end it felt comfortable. Rating would probably go up if I read it again! Some interesting conversations in there from a time I don’t really know much about - the introduction by Lucy Scholes helped. Wish Kitty became a Suffragette.

[Hilary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of the novels I have read recently have concerned wealthy families in the early 20th century. Probably not the best time to read this then, when I was already feeling a little bored of the subject. I did love the character of feisty old Mrs Weston with her firm liberal views and her hilarious drives whilst chatting with her chauffeur via the speaking tube. But apart from her, I was not inspired and had to force myself to get through to what was, for me, a somewhat predictable conclusion.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

A slow-starting and strange drama.

This book was interesting enough to read, although very slow to start and I found it fairly dull until around halfway through at which point I found it more disturbing than interesting. I did enjoy the style of writing which was a little different.

[A J HOOPER · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seem to have been reading a lot of novels recently set just before or at the onset of the Great War. This has something to do with the rediscovery and republication of authors such as Rose Macaulay and Isabel Colegate.
Statues In A Garden is brief, concise and reads like a film plot. Women's clothes are described almost erotically, in filmic terms. And ultimately eroticism lies at the heart of the story.
Phillip falls in love with his not much older foster mother and has little concern that he is betraying his extremely decent uncle. In fact Phillip is the embodiment of the new life and morality that the English are about to be pitched into as a result of the forthcoming war.
Phillip too is responsible for bankrupting his uncle through his own impatience to get rich. In fact his forays into the world of stocks and shares are so poor that you do wonder if he too will end up penniless. He is a thoroughly unpleasant young man. Yet you learn in later life he has become rich and powerful, adeptly underlining how cynical the world has become.
The theme of suffrage runs throughout the text though marriage is still a prime concern for the young women living in or visiting the big house. And hanging over everything is our knowledge and that of the raconteur that the war and the Spanish flu will remove thousands of young men from this life, leaving thousands more women who will never be able to marry, a deprived generation.
I much preferred this short book to the author's Orlando Trilogy. Its one of those rare works that says a great deal in few words. I get so tired of the bricks authors feel compelled to come up with these days. This is a perfect example of how unnecessary thousands of words can be.

[Pascale · Rating 3 out of 5]

A family is destroyed from within by a resentful nephew who seduces his upstanding uncle's wife out of sheer spite and envy. Philip is a nasty piece of work who can't stomach the fact that although Aylmer and Cynthia Weston have adopted him, they will quite naturally leave their small but delightful estate in Wiltshire to their son and heir, Edmund. Philip betrays his benefactors in 2 ways, first by investing a lot of their money with a dodgy businessman, and second by sleeping with Cynthia who feels bored and restless as her eldest daughter Violet is getting married and Aylmer, a member of Lord Asquith's cabinet, is increasingly preoccupied with the international situation on the eve of WWI. Philip is half-aware of his base motivations, but can't stop himself. When told of his wife's adultery, Aylmer commits suicide, which is turns kills his elderly mother. Edmund marries his younger sister's Irish governess, Alice, but dies early in the war, as does Violet's husband. Alice reveals herself to be the book's narrator in the last chapter, which throws retrospective light on why the story is told the way it is. Philip, of course, manages to avoid serving, turns into a war profiteer, gets a peerage but makes a mess of his private life. The previously blameless Cynthia goes on to have a string of lovers and dies with her reputation in ruins. This is a typical story of the downfall of a family both foreshadowing and compounded by the fall of a class and a way of life, but it's very well put together with the right dose of cynicism and nostalgia. It's a pity that the Bloomsbury reprint I got is riddled with misprints.

[JacquiWine · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5 Stars)

Set in the tense, heady months leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, Isabel Colegate’s Statues in a Garden is a great summer read – an evocative story of betrayal and transgression in which the fall of a privileged family prefigures the broader political disasters to come. Like The Shooting Party (Colegate’s best-known book), Statues peels back the polite surface veneer of Edwardian society, revealing the immorality, vitriol and corruption simmering underneath.

Statues revolves around the prosperous Weston family: Aylmer Weston, a liberal politician and member of Herbert Asquith’s Cabinet; his beautiful wife Cynthia, who enjoys her role as society hostess; and the Weston’s three grown-up children – Edmund, who is following in his father’s footsteps by training to be a barrister, Violet, soon to be married, and Kitty, the youngest and most impressionable of the three with her Suffragette sympathies. Also of significance are Aylmer’s twenty-eight-year-old nephew, Philip, whom the Westons adopted some twenty years earlier when his parents died of cholera, and Alymer’s elderly mother, Mrs Weston, who enjoys nothing more than being driven around by her trusty chauffeur, Moberley, who doubles as her chief confidante. Then there is Alice Benedict, Kitty’s newly-appointed governess-companion, who soon catches the eye of both Edmund and Philip. However, while Edmund is genuine in his love for Alice, Philip is most certainly not – a fact that soon becomes apparent to the reader as the story unfolds.

In short, Philip is a disrupter – impatient, provocative and rather cruel in his attitudes towards others, despite his comfortable upbringing with the Westons. Having grown bored of life in the Army, he is eager to make some money of his own – preferably a lot of money – by going into business with Horgan, a London-based stockbroker dealing in South African investments. Aylmer, however, has some initial doubts, confiding in Cynthia about his concerns for the young man.

He [Philip] wants to leave the Army and put the money in some stockbroking venture, but when he was talking to me, I suddenly had the feeling that his motives were all wrong, and he was only doing it because he resents not having enough money to cut it – among his brother officers, and because he resents Edmund, and that made me feel that perhaps we have failed him in some way. But how? (P. 49)

Nevertheless, with both Westons wishing to see Philip settled in some kind of career, Aylmer agrees to invest £9,000 in a sure-fire venture of Horgan’s, solely based on Philip’s advice. Before long, other Cabinet Ministers and members of the Weston family are buying shares in Cape Enterprises (all facilitated by Philip, of course), contributing to a sharp rise in the share price that Horgan duly exploits.

To read the rest of my review, please visit:
https://jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2023...

[Simon S. · Rating 3 out of 5]

England, 1914. The Westons—wealthy, well-placed, and thoroughly Edwardian—drift through a broiling summer of picnics and dinners, quietly unaware that their way of life is on the brink of extinction.

At the centre is Cynthia, a luminous society hostess who hides her sharpness behind charm, and her husband Aylmer, a Liberal MP already made obsolete by the pace of the changing world. Their household includes a bright, restive daughter, a son about to go to war, and adopted son and nephew, Philip, whose presence serves as the novel’s gentle catalyst.

Philip is a manipulator, clever but callow, with a kind of furtive hunger. His schemes are domestic rather than diabolical, but they cause small, significant shifts in the lives of his hosts. His complex feelings for Cynthia pose a disquieting threat.

Colegate excels at this kind of still dissection. The novel doesn’t shout; it hums. Beneath the surface of the drawing-room conversation is a growing unease, an ache for something real, as the characters perform their roles with the polish of people who’ve never questioned them—until now.

The titular statues—graceful, idealised, but slowly crumbling—are a perfect emblem. These people, too, are cast in elegant shapes, but weather is coming.

This is a novel of atmosphere and emotional undercurrent rather than high drama. Its power lies in its restraint and its ability to render a world already fading, even as its inhabitants still believe it eternal. Quiet, poignant, and wise.

[Michael Ritchie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this slim novel up on a whim years ago at a second-hand bookstore and as I was about to pitch it in a mini-frenzy of weeding the other day, I decided to give it a go. It's one of the best novels I've read in years. I read Colegate's The Shooting Party way back in the 1980s and saw the movie, and liked both. This one, written earlier, shares some of the atmosphere of that book. It's set in England during the summer of 1914, leading you to believe that WWI will play a part, but it doesn't really, except for a handful of contact points. It's been described as being about scandal overtaking a high class family, but really, it's about what happens before the scandal. The aftermath, though important and devastating, is dealt with mostly in brief in the final pages.

One Goodreads review refers to Colegate's style as "Virginia Woolf lite" and that's a perfect way to put it. There is a narrator of sorts, though we don't learn who it is until the end, but most of it is told third person with shifting perspectives with the first person coming up only occasionally. It's more like it's being told by a hive mind, so to speak, of all the characters. It takes a few pages to get used to this style, but it's very effective. At under 200 pages, it can be read in a couple of sittings, though I tried to stretch it out because it was so good. I will try to dig up more Colegate.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Edwardian London, 1914. The sun still shone on the British Empire, and the Westons basked in the golden aura. Lady Cynthia was beautiful, her husband Aylmer was a member of Asquith's cabinet. Their children were properly mannered. Their nephew Philip was a bit of a rake, but handsomely so. Theirs was an elegant, insulated world.

"But it was a fragile world. And a forbidden passion was slowly blossoming that would shatter the Westons in a way scarcely imaginable -- and quite unthinkable amongst the English upperclass."
~~back cover

An odd little book -- very slow starting, trudging through the set up for the final horrible shattering. If those fool women had only kept their mouths shut ... but they didn't, and so it played out to the bitter end.

[Mrs B · Rating 5 out of 5]

A slice of pre-WWI life, jam-packed with impending doom (as the analogy to Eve in the garden of paradise before the fall makes clear).

Beneath the veneer of polite society, ugly emotions simmer. Ladies’ maid Beatrice boils with vitriol when she learns her chauffeur lover prefers another. Lady Cynthia floats effortlessly through her spoilt life, until her beauty starts to fade and she realises that being a good person is difficult. Meanwhile Philip, who is labelled as “Violence” or “Darkness” in the statues in the garden game, unleashes havoc on all around him.

This is very fine writing, and the author very deftly brings the political tensions of the era into vivid colour through her portrayal of the Weston family.

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Colegate's "The Shooting Party" is a favourite of mine, but nevertheless I did not expect to enjoy this novel as much as I did.

At a very basic level, there are some parallels between "The Shooting Party" and "Statues in a Garden" as in each the author explores how the looming shadow of World War I threatens to destroy an aristocratic British family's way of life and overturn the ideals their ancestors had held for centuries. However, "Statues in a Garden" was somehow darker and more tense, building momentum effectively through the author's layering of historical/political tableaux with the more personal family dramas taking place at the same time. Because of this, I think this book has surpassed "The Shooting Party" for me. Highly recommend.

[Dawn Tyers · Rating 3 out of 5]

At first a little difficult to get into I ended up really quite liking this one. The characters are pretty much well drawn, the setting immersive and the sense of foreboding cleverly introduced. The characters’ voices are largely upper class, the dismissal of their staff seemingly offhand but in reality generally appropriate to the age in which the book is set. The sense of impending social and political change kept my interest and I found the book in the end to be quite moving.

[Katie Mcsweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was like reading a Downtown Abbey spin-off… loved it. The writing was very good but unusual. I kept getting lost wondering who was narrating at the beginning but once it clicked it was fabulous.

This edition has far too many typos. Spelling errors, full stops missing or in the wrong place.

[Bridget Vollmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this strange little book.

[Afterwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love a character study and historical accuracy.

[Dave Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://electrichalibut.blogspot.co.uk...

[Tolkien InMySleep · Rating 4 out of 5]

Isabel Colegate is a remarkable writer, and I feel so excited to have discovered her work. This dissection of an upper class English family just before the First World War is full of craft, and would merit repeated readings. Why Colegate remains so little-known is a mystery, but probably owes more to bad luck than anything else. Definitely a 4.5 Review. Note - I would have to nominate this as the worst proof-read book I've EVER read. Bloomsbury Publishing - hang your heads in shame! This edition is an insult to a fine writer.