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Elizabeth Jane Howard
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Elizabeth Jane Howard
Elizabeth Jane Howard CBE FRSL (26 March 1923 – 2 January 2014), was an English novelist. She wrote 15 novels including the best-selling series The Cazalet Chronicle.
Howard's father was Major David Liddon Howard MC (1896–1958), a timber merchant who followed the work of his own father, Alexander Liddon Howard (1863–1946).[citation needed] Her mother was Katharine Margaret Somervell (1895–1975), a dancer with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and daughter of composer Sir Arthur Somervell. (Howard's brother, Colin, lived with her and her third husband, Kingsley Amis, for 17 years.) Mostly educated at home, Howard briefly attended Francis Holland School before attending domestic-science college at Ebury Street and secretarial college in central London.
Howard worked briefly as an actress in provincial repertory and occasionally as a model before her writing career, which began in 1947.
The Beautiful Visit (1950), Howard's first novel, was described as "distinctive, self-assured and remarkably sensual". It won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1951 for best novel by a writer under 30. She next collaborated with Robert Aickman, writing three of the six short stories in the collection We Are for the Dark (1951).
Her second novel, The Long View (1956), describes a marriage in reverse chronology; Angela Lambert remarked, "Why The Long View isn't recognised as one of the great novels of the 20th century I will never know."
Howard published five additional novels before she embarked on her best known work, the five-volume Cazalet Chronicle. As Artemis Cooper describes it: “Jane had two ideas, and could not decide which to embark on; so she invited her stepson Martin [Amis] round for a drink to ask his advice. One idea was an updated version of Sense and Sensibility … the other was a three-volume family saga … Martin said immediately, “Do that one.”
The Chronicle was a family saga "about the ways in which English life changed during the war years, particularly for women." It follows three generations of a middle-class English family and drew heavily from Howard's own life and memories. The first four volumes, The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off, were published from 1990 to 1995. Howard wrote the fifth, All Change (2013), in one year; it was her final novel. Millions of copies of the Cazalet Chronicle have been sold worldwide, and the novels remain in print ten years after her death.
The Light Years and Marking Time were serialised by Cinema Verity for BBC Television as The Cazalets in 2001. A BBC Radio 4 version in 45 episodes was also broadcast from 2012.
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Elizabeth Jane Howard
Elizabeth Jane Howard CBE FRSL (26 March 1923 – 2 January 2014), was an English novelist. She wrote 15 novels including the best-selling series The Cazalet Chronicle.
Howard's father was Major David Liddon Howard MC (1896–1958), a timber merchant who followed the work of his own father, Alexander Liddon Howard (1863–1946).[citation needed] Her mother was Katharine Margaret Somervell (1895–1975), a dancer with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and daughter of composer Sir Arthur Somervell. (Howard's brother, Colin, lived with her and her third husband, Kingsley Amis, for 17 years.) Mostly educated at home, Howard briefly attended Francis Holland School before attending domestic-science college at Ebury Street and secretarial college in central London.
Howard worked briefly as an actress in provincial repertory and occasionally as a model before her writing career, which began in 1947.
The Beautiful Visit (1950), Howard's first novel, was described as "distinctive, self-assured and remarkably sensual". It won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1951 for best novel by a writer under 30. She next collaborated with Robert Aickman, writing three of the six short stories in the collection We Are for the Dark (1951).
Her second novel, The Long View (1956), describes a marriage in reverse chronology; Angela Lambert remarked, "Why The Long View isn't recognised as one of the great novels of the 20th century I will never know."
Howard published five additional novels before she embarked on her best known work, the five-volume Cazalet Chronicle. As Artemis Cooper describes it: “Jane had two ideas, and could not decide which to embark on; so she invited her stepson Martin [Amis] round for a drink to ask his advice. One idea was an updated version of Sense and Sensibility … the other was a three-volume family saga … Martin said immediately, “Do that one.”
The Chronicle was a family saga "about the ways in which English life changed during the war years, particularly for women." It follows three generations of a middle-class English family and drew heavily from Howard's own life and memories. The first four volumes, The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off, were published from 1990 to 1995. Howard wrote the fifth, All Change (2013), in one year; it was her final novel. Millions of copies of the Cazalet Chronicle have been sold worldwide, and the novels remain in print ten years after her death.
The Light Years and Marking Time were serialised by Cinema Verity for BBC Television as The Cazalets in 2001. A BBC Radio 4 version in 45 episodes was also broadcast from 2012.