Introduction
Elizabeth Jane Howard,
CBEThe Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is a British order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by King George V. The Order includes five classes in civil and military divisions...
is an English novelist. She was an actress and a model before becoming a novelist. In 1951, she won the
John Llewellyn Rhys PrizeThe John Llewellyn Rhys Prize is a British based literary prize. It is presented for the best work of literature by an author aged 35 or under, and from Britain or from the British Commonwealth....
for her first novel,
The Beautiful Visit. Six further novels followed, before she embarked on her best known work, a four novel family saga set in wartime England.
The Light Years,
Marking Time,
Confusion, and
Casting Off were serialised by
Cinema VerityCinema Verity was a British independent television and film production company, founded in 1985 by Verity Lambert, the television producer, who named the company after herself and as a pun on the expression 'cinéma vérité'....
for
BBC televisionBBC Television is a service of the British Broadcasting Corporation which began in 1932. The British Broadcasting Corporation has operated in the United Kingdom under the terms of a Royal Charter since 1927.-History of BBC Television:...
as
The Cazalets (
The Light Years,
Marking Time,
Confusion and
Casting Off). She has also written a book of short stories,
Mr Wrong, and edited two anthologies.
Profile
Elizabeth Jane Howard was born on March 26, 1923 in London, the eldest child of David Liddon Howard, a timber merchant and Katherine (Kit), née Somervell, a composer (Sir Arthur Somervell)and music educationalist's daughter, who had given up her career as a dancer in the Ballet Rambert for marriage. The timber business, Howard Brothers, was founded after the First World War by her paternal grandfather, Alexander Howard. Howard had enlisted in the Machine Gun Corps in 1914 aged 17, and survived four years on the western front. After the Second World War, David divorced his wife and the new stepmother worked steadily to detach him from his children, Jane and her two younger brothers, Robin and Colin. Jane received only a limited education, at nursery schools and a governess, and never attended university. Her mother Kit was regarded by many are a rather unlikeable woman, and this is particularly noted in Zachary Leader's biography of Kingsley Amis (
The Life of Kingsley Amis). According to Colin Howard, she was extremely cold towards his sister:
Howard married Sir
Peter ScottSir Peter Markham Scott, CH, CBE, DSC, FRS, FZS, was a British ornithologist, conservationist, painter, naval officer and sportsman.-Early life:...
, the naturalist and son of Captain Scott, in 1942; she was 19 and he was 33. In 1943 they had a daughter, Nicola (now Nicola Starks the jewellery designer) but divorced in 1951. Howard says of her first husbsnd:
She was also unfaithful, having her first affair with Peter Scott's half-brother, Wayland Young. Once Jane moved out of their house in Edwardes Square, she was determined to become a writer, 'I was selfishly determined to be a writer at any cost, to put it first, and I knew that I had to do it alone' - that is without three-year-old Nicola who moved in with a friend who has a child of a similar age and Jane visited every week. Nicola never again lived with her mother, though Jane was always in touch adn took care of her education, holidays and doctor's visits.
After moving into a small flat in a run-down 18th-century building off Baker Street, it took her three years to complete her first novel,
The Beautiful Visit (Jonathan Cape), about a girl trying to escape her family. This launched her career aged 26 and she soon became a literary 'It-girl', appearing at a grand evening in a gown designed for her by Victor Stiebel, to the fury of another femme fatale novelist, Rosamond Lehmann. During this time she took no money off Scott, except for Nicola's expenses, and supported herself as a secretary, a continuity announcer at the BBC, a publisher's reader adn copy-editor, notably for Chatto & Windus, a journalist, eventually as a reviewer for Queens magazine, and a model for Vogue (at three guineas a day). In 1951, the novel won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for the best novel by anyone under 30.
Nicola says she never objected to this arrangement: "She was just a very beautiful stranger who would visit from time to time." During this period she also had a stream of lovers, including Cecil Day Lewis (in 1958) who was married to her friend Jill Balcon. However, Howard was guilt-stricken and ended the affair as soon as possible (later, the three became close friends again and Jane invited the couple to her and Amis' house, where the famous poet spent his dying days). Another lover was Laurie Lee, who took Jane to Spain to recover from an unhappy affair. By the winter it was an established liaison and Tom Maschler, the publisher, lent them his house.
In 1956 she published The Long View (a Book Society Choice), a study of a marriage told backwards in time. In the late 1950s she also started to work properly and, as part of this period of self-improvement, she decided to stop being a mistress, and married the Australian journalist and broadcaster Jim Douglas-Henry (1958-1960), later a successful writer of ghost stories. Her brother Colin says of Douglas-Henry,
During this period she wrote The Sea Change
, perhaps her least satisfactory novel (although John Davenport, described it in The Observer at the time as 'a triumph'), which deals with the transformation and redemption of an ancient, rich couple who have grown warped around long-hoarded miseries. She was asked to help organise the 1962 Cheltenham Literary Festival, in which she played an important role, working for eight months to raise its profile for a director's fee of £300 plus expenses. This is also where her affair with the novelist Sir
Kingsley AmisSir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than twenty novels, three collections of poetry, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism...
started, druing which she began writing After Julius, a novel about courage, duty and love. As Zachary Leader, Amis's biographer, describes her at the time,
Her third marriage was to last from 1965 to 1983. The Amis' first real house was at 108 Maida Vale, before buying 'Lemmons', a Georgian house set in three acres on Hadley Common in Barnet, London. It sheltered a rambling collection of family and friends: Kit Howard lived there until she died in 1971 and Colin shared the house for eight years. His friend, the painter Sargy Mann, also had a part of the house until he left to marry another painter, Frances Carey. Howard found herself cooking and running a household of eight or more people and writing less and less. As she herself says,
It was here that Amis started to drink very heavily and was on a bottle of scotch a day. By the mid-1970s, drink or middle age had eroded Amis's capacity in bed. She was resentful and he resented her resentment, so while she wrote nothing literary he wrote bitter novels to rid his imagination of her - Jake's Thing
and Stanley and the Women. In 1975, the household at Lemmons broke up, and the Amises moved to Gardnor House in Hampstead, where there was no room for the extended household and it was also too small for their burgeoning resentments. Amis was also still drinking heavily - at a weekend party given by the philanthropist Drue Heinz, for example, he drank an enormous amount and Jane had to help him upstairs. Colin also remembers Amis often going upstairs to bed on all fours, too unsteady to walk (though he never missed a morning at the typewriter). In 1980, she finally left Kingsley by way of a lawyer's letter sent from a health farm whence she had retreated for a week with the quarter-written manuscript of a novel called Getting it Right. She offered to return if he would give up drinking altogether, but this wasn't something to which he could agree. In her hand-delivered letter she wrote:
In 1982, on the advice of Martin Amis, she started work on a series of novels, based on the experience of her own family, about the transformation of English society in the second world war. The Cazalet Chronicles - four were written over 15 years - restored her finances, and in 1990 she moved to a Georgian house in Suffolk, next to Sargy Mann. Kingsley Amis died that year, still rancorous about her.
in 1995, a very curious incident occurred in her life after her second appearance on Desert Island Discs. A fan wrote to her, wanting to know more, and soon he had seduced her, though her family and friends remained suspicious. He claimed that a previous wife had died in a riding accident but records at Somerset House revealed no information of this. Nicola and Colin persuaded her that the suitor was a pathological liar who had betrayed her. Out of this experience came her strangest and darkest book, Falling, published in 1999, in which the heroine is pursued by a figure of inexhaustible malevolence whom she has summoned by moving into the wrong house. The wickedness is embodied in a gardener named Henry, written in the first person, in chapters which alternate with the third-person narrator's observation of the heroine.
She continues to lve in
BungayBungay is a small town in Suffolk , within The Broads National Park. It lies in the Waveney valley, about 7 km west of Beccles.-Early history:...
in
SuffolkSuffolk is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in East Anglia, England. It has borders with Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south. The North Sea lies to the east...
and was awarded a
CBECBE and C.B.E. are abbreviations for Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a grade in the Order of the British Empire.Other uses include:*Calgary Board of Education, public school board for the city of Calgary, Alberta...
in 2000..
Autobiography
Elizabeth Jane Howard's autobiography, Slipstream, was published in 2002 by Pan.
In it she states that the quest for love in her life remained a constant, saying in an interview "I thought that if I could get love right, everything else would follow naturally." The reason she couldn't get it right had to do with her parents. Her mother, a former dancer with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, followed the old-fashioned parental practice of undermining a child's self-esteem, and her daughter was made aware that she was not good-looking, clever, or good at anything. Her handsome father was charming, gregarious and kind – until around the time of her 15th birthday, when he remarked how fast she was growing up and sexually assaulted her. She struggled free and, after several other assaults, made sure she was never alone with him.
Of her time spent with Kingsley Amis at their house, Lemmons, EJH says,
On her divorce from Kingsley Amis,
On her house in Bungay, Suffolk, and reflections on her past life in an interview with Clare Colvin (author of 'Masque of the Gonzagas') in The Independent
:
External links