Elizabeth Jane Howard

Elizabeth Jane Howard
Born	26 March 1923(1923-03-26) London, United Kingdom
Occupation	Novelist,
Genres	Fiction, Non-Fiction
Influences Jane Austen
Influenced Martin Amis, Kingsley Amis

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Profile 3 Autobiography 4 Bibliography 5 References 6 External links

Introduction

Elizabeth Jane Howard, CBE is an English novelist. She was an actress and a model before becoming a novelist. In 1951, she won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize 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 Verity for 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:

“

Mother quite obviously preferred her sons [there was another brother, Robin], and couldn't see anything good about Jane. I said once, after reading one of Jane's novels, 'I think she does write rather beautifully', and mother replied, 'It's a pity she doesn't have anything to write about'. And I know that if I had written anything even half as good, she would have been embarrassing in her praise.[1]

”

Howard married Sir Peter Scott, 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:

“

He was not practised at intimacy with women, though he had no trouble seducing them. I was lonely, spendthrift and oppressed by my brilliant and dominating mother-in-law, the sculptor Kathleen Scott, who had married Lord Kennet after her first husband died.[1]

”

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.^[2]

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 Queen's magazine, and a model for Vogue (at three guineas a day).^[2] 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,

“

He was a beguiling person [but] with deep streaks of both cruelty and unreliability... He was opportunistic. He married Jane almost for a meal ticket. He thought she was a lot richer than she was, because of the way she lived ... It might have been a disappointment to find that she wasn't and had to work quite hard to live in the way that she lived.[2]

”

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 Amis 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,

“

Charming, funny and extremely good-looking, with high cheekbones, waist-length blonde hair and long shapely legs, Jane was handsome in her beauty and could also be imperious and haughty, often, she now explains, out of shyness ... As her memoirs make clear ... romantic love had always been for Jane "the most desirable, the most important of human emotions'. Yet she had long thought of herself as 'incapable of sustaining, inspiring or receiving it." She attributes this sense of inadequacy to her mother ... For all her beauty, talent and accompllishments, Jane often felt insecure and inadequate and was much given to self-pity.[3]

”

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,

“

I worked very little with Kingsley. I simply didn't have the energy. I felt totally un-acknowledged really - not by Kingsley: he was always nice and respectful of my work, but it didn't occur to him that it was difficult to cook for eight people and do the shopping and all the driving and the accounts and write the letters and write. He got up and wrote. Then he ate lunch, had a walk or a sleep, and then he wrote again.[1]

”

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).^[4] 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:

“

I've thought about this for a long time and have come to the conclusion that there isn't the slightest hope of things getting any better. They don't, they simple get worse. You are not going to stop drinking and I cannot live with the consequences - I tried to tell you in Edinburgh that it was not the rows that were the worst things - it was the awful sterile desert in between them that I can't take any more. I'd rather live alone than the way we've been living for the last few years.[5]

”

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 in 1995, still rancorous about her.

In that same year, 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 Bungay in Suffolk and was awarded a CBE in 2000.^[6].

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.^[7]

Of her time spent with Kingsley Amis at their house, Lemmons, EJH says,

“

I wrote very little in those years. I had a block, which came from being over-tired. Kingsley was one of the most disciplined writers I've ever known. Sometimes I envied him because he didn't have to organise the food, or other household matters, but that was part of the deal. He didn't stop me writing, and was encouraging about what I wrote. It's simply that I didn't have the time.

”

On her divorce from Kingsley Amis,

“

I don't think it's easy to live with someone who drinks too much, but in the end I couldn't live with someone who disliked me so much, as well. You can go on living with someone who doesn't love you, but what is really killing is someone who dislikes you. My sense of survival got me through that, and I was also helped by psychotherapy. If you want to be a better person, you take any opportunity that comes your way and I was lucky in having good psychotherapists, who introduced me to a women's group.

”

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:

“

She bought her house ten minutes after first seeing it. Houses have always been important to her: this one is her harbour after a stormy life, including recent ill-health and another emotional misjudgment when she was duped by a con man. She used that experience in her recent novel, Falling. Elizabeth Jane Howard has been hard on herself in her relentless search for honesty. Looking back over her life, what has she most regretted? "I regret very much not having had more children. I would have liked Nicola to have had more siblings. Also, if I had realised I was getting arthritis I would have done more about it earlier on, and paid more attention to my body. I don't mind being old at all – I find it quite interesting – but I do mind bodily pain."[7]

”

Bibliography

• The Beautiful Visit. Jonathan Cape. 1950. ISBN 0-224-60977-7. 

• We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories. Jonathan Cape. 1951. (a collection containing three stories by Howard and three by Robert Aickman)

• The Long View. Jonathan Cape. 1956. ISBN 0-224-60318-3. 

• The Sea Change. Jonathan Cape. 1959. ISBN 0-224-60319-1. 

• After Julius. Jonathan Cape. 1965. ISBN 0-224-61037-6. 

• Something in Disguise. Jonathan Cape. 1969. ISBN 0-224-61744-3. 

• Odd Girl Out. Jonathan Cape. 1972. ISBN 0-224-00661-4. 

• Mr. Wrong. Jonathan Cape. 1975. 

• Getting it Right. Hamish Hamilton. 1982. ISBN 0-241-10805-5. 

• The Light Years. Macmillan. 1990. ISBN 0-333-53875-7. 

• Marking Time. Macmillan. 1991. ISBN 0-333-56596-7. 

• Confusion. Macmillan. 1993. ISBN 0-333-57582-2. 

• Casting Off. Macmillan. 1995. ISBN 0-333-60757-0. 

• Falling. Macmillan. 1999. ISBN 0-333-73020-8. 

• Slipstream. Macmillan. 2002. ISBN 0-333-90349-8. 

• Three Miles Up and Other Strange Stories. ISBN 1-872621-75-9. contains the three stories included in We Are for the Dark, plus Mr Wrong.

References

External links

• Guardian Article about Elizabeth Jane Howard
• Photographs/images of Elizabeth Jane Howard [1]
• Interview between Zachary Leader and Martin Amis, with some references to EJH [2]
• BBC series of The Cazelets [3] and [4]