All Change by Elizabeth Jane Howard – review
Alex Clark enjoys the final volume of Howard's series on the
upper-class Cazalet family
Alex Clark
Thu 14 Nov 2013 09.01 GMT First published on Thu 14 Nov 2013
09.01 GMT
In the early 1980s, with several novels, including After
Julius and Something in Disguise to her name, Elizabeth Jane Howard was casting
around for a new fictional project. Apart from artistic considerations, she was
in the process of separating from Kingsley Amis, to whom she had been married
since 1965, and needed both absorption and funds. In Slipstream, her 2002
memoir, Howard describes how she had "two ideas that I found
paralysing": an updating of Sense and Sensibility and a trilogy about a
family that would begin in 1937 and span a decade. She invited her stepson
Martin to come for a drink and talk it over; when she told him about the family
saga, his response was immediate: "Do that one."
The current (and recurrent) vogue for adapting Austen
notwithstanding, Amis was probably right. In 1982, the same year that the
highly popular TV adaptation of Something in Disguise first aired, Howard began
The Light Years, the first volume of what was to become The Cazalet Chronicles.
Such was the sprawling nature of the narrative – it kept to its 10-year
framework, and largely to its London and Sussex settings, but featured an
ever-expanding cast – that the proposed trilogy became a quartet, published
between 1990 and 1995. Now, nearly 20 years later, the 90-year-old Howard has
added a fifth volume, which rejoins the upper-class Cazalet family, its inlaws
and exes, its staff, associates and fellow travellers, in 1956.
Howard's original inspiration to write a wartime series had
a particular impetus. "When people wrote about that time," she
explained in Slipstream, "it was largely in terms of the battles fought;
family life was merely a background. I thought it would be interesting to do it
the other way round. England had changed so much during the war, but this
hadn't been much written about." In All Change, the battles are over a
decade in the past, their participants returned, their dead mourned and the
seismic shock of war dispersed to some extent; but its aftershocks provide the
novel's low‑key and yet insistent backdrop.
At the beginning of The Light Years, the Cazalets congregate
for a summer holiday at Home Place, the family pile in Sussex. The story is
structured around the four adult children of "the Brig" and "the
Duchy"': their three sons Hugh, Edward and Rupert, each of them with wives
and children in tow, and their unmarried daughter Rachel, who is conducting a
discreet relationship with "Sid", speedily revealed to be a woman. In
among the personal dramas – a dangerous birth, a spoilt younger wife, unhappy
step-children, covert lesbianism – the largely silent Brig busily buys a spare
farmhouse and sets about converting it for his family's use, adding wings and
bathrooms and whatnot, all on the rolling proceeds of the family timber firm.
But 20 years later, the firm is foundering, its revenues falling and its
property portfolio rapidly becoming a liability rather than an asset. All three
sons – uxorious Hugh, faithless Edward, indecisive Rupert – are now in charge,
but they don't have their late father's head for business; and, even more
fatally, they aren't equipped for or don't want to recognise the disaster about
to befall them. It is as though the possibility of failure – and of the
profound effect that it will have on their material circumstances and social
standing – has simply not occurred to them; they are insulated until the moment
an impertinent bank manager, certainly of a class below theirs, informs them to
the contrary.
Other certainties are also fracturing. Edward's divorce and
remarriage to the ghastly snob Diana, whose dresses are too small and makeup
too liberally applied, has had its effects on his children: Louise, having
walked out on her first husband and their son, is a wealthy man's mistress, and
her brother Teddy flits between debs and barmaids. Hugh's daughter Polly, now
Lady Fakenham and one of the series' most reliable favourites, is trying to get
a wedding reception business going in her husband's dilapidated ancestral home,
and is running into problems because the clients won't put up with one loo and
salad cream instead of mayonnaise. Nannies and governesses are succumbing to
senility. In protest at the whole crumbling edifice, one far‑flung
relative has gone off to become a monk. Elsewhere, bohemianism laps at the
family's respectability: Clary, once an awkward child who has become a literary
type married to a much older man, writes a play candidly dissecting her marital
trials and tribulations; her younger brother, a raffish photographer, falls in
incestuous love. It's a far cry from nursery teas.
And yet there remains something deeply and comfortingly
old-fashioned about what we are told will be the last slice of Cazalet life. It
has its minor subversions, not least because its female characters, often the
most interesting and sympathetic, are portrayed with an increasing sense of
their own agency; even Rachel, the stay-at-home daughter rooted in the family
home but with no actual control over what will become of it, proves herself to
be surprisingly adaptable. But in spite of these developments, and a few small
anachronisms, it cleaves to the reassuring form of the family drama, in which
people come and go, get born and die off, fall in and out of love, and either
stay firmly on track or go spectacularly off the rails. Even in 1990, it was
hardly innovative, and now, despite our Downton-friendly, pastiche-loving
times, it is difficult to imagine many more novels like this appearing. No
matter. What the Cazalets had on their side was the strength of Howard's
characterisation and her canny blend of sympathy and curiosity. Despite her
finale's title, that has not changed.
Elizabeth Jane Howard: Hilary Mantel on the novelist she
tells everyone to read
Elizabeth Jane Howard’s exquisite and understated novels
have been overshadowed by her turbulent private life. But is the real reason
why they are underestimated because they are books ‘about women, by a woman’?
Hilary Mantel
Sat 30 Jan 2016 11.00 GMT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018
12.53 GMT
Elizabeth Jane Howard: 'I never felt that Kingsley was a
better writer than me'
Read more
In recent years Elizabeth Jane Howard, who was always known
as Jane, has become famous for a quartet of novels known as the “Cazalet
Chronicles”, which draw on her own family story and were adapted for radio and
television. Tracing the fortunes of an upper-middle-class family, the quartet
begins in 1937 and covers a decade; a fifth novel, All Change, skips ahead to
1956. The novels are panoramic, expansive, intriguing as social history and
generous in their storytelling. They are the product of a lifetime’s
experience, and come from a writer who knew her aim and had the stamina and
technical skill to achieve it. It would be rewarding if the readers who enjoyed
the series were drawn to the author’s earlier work, when her talent seemed so
effervescent, so unstoppable, that there was no predicting where it might take
her. From the beginning she attracted superlatives, more for the gorgeousness
of her prose than for the emotional extravagance of her characters. Their
laughter was outrageous, their weeping contagious, their love affairs reckless.
But there was nothing uncalculated about the author’s effects. From the first,
she was a craftswoman.
Howard’s first novel, The Beautiful Visit, won the John
Llewellyn Rhys memorial prize. It is daunting to think that The Long View, so
accomplished, so technically adroit, was only her second book. It begins in 1950,
and each part draws us backwards through the life of Antonia Fleming, till we
arrive in 1926, when we find her as a young girl about to be tenderly deceived,
baffled and bullied into wifehood.
Despite early praise and attention, it was hard for Howard
to make a living. She came from a background where the necessity was not much
considered. In The Long View, Mrs Fleming’s passport states her occupation as
“Married Woman”. In this world, men are not obliged to explain or account for
themselves. Creatures endlessly to be placated, they look to mould a woman into
a satisfactory, if not perfect, wife. Conrad Fleming seeks to mould Antonia. He
is a man of unblemished conceit, immaculate selfishness. Young female readers
today may view him with incredulity. They should not. He is faithfully
recorded. He is the voice of the day before yesterday, and also the voice of
the ages past.
Howard was born in 1923 to a family who were affluent, well
connected and miserable. Her father and his brother were the directors of the
family timber firm. They didn’t do much directing; “they just had a jolly nice
time,” she said. They had earned it. Her father had enlisted at 17, survived
the great war on the western front, brought home a Military Cross. He was a warm
father, but duplicitous and unsafe. Her mingled fear and fascination fuelled
the Cazalet novels, which are less cosy than they appear. Her parents’ marriage
and their subsequent relationships, together with her own, provided a model of
instructive dysfunction for almost every story she wrote. “There were only two
kinds of people,” thinks Conrad in The Long View, “those who live different
lives with the same partner, and those who live the same life with different
partners … ” It is one of many such jaundiced observations – pithily expressed,
painfully accurate.
Howard’s mother, Kit, was a disappointed dancer. She had
given up her professional career for marriage. The dancer’s world is so
brutally testing that it’s hard to say, in any particular case, whether such a
choice was coloured by a suspicion of being not quite good enough. Second-rate
young men went abroad, their CVs condensed into the acronym FILTH: Failed in
London, Try Hong Kong. Women in retreat from their potential could choose the
internal exile of marriage, and the results were often dingy. Kit does not seem
to have liked her daughter. Perhaps she was jealous of her. Howard was a young
woman of spectacular looks. Repeatedly in the novels, mature adults gaze in
mingled envy and delight at the person least to be envied, an adolescent who is
a writhing mass of uncertainties. Howard had little formal education, but she
was a reader. And her piano teacher imparted something of great value: “how to
learn: how to take the trouble and go on taking it.”
Briefly, she became an actor. The second world war blighted
her career hopes. Like Mrs Fleming, she saw “the value of lives rocketing up
and down like shares on a crazy stock market”. In such an atmosphere, decisions
were taken quickly – there was no long view. She was 19 when she married the
naturalist Peter Scott, then a naval officer, aged 32. The night before the
wedding, her mother asked her if she knew anything about sex, describing it as
“the nasty side” of marriage. Howard’s daughter Nicola was born during an air
raid. It was a horrific experience. She knew to save it up and use it later.
When the war was over she abandoned husband and infant daughter, something the
world does not readily forgive. She moved into a dirty flat off Baker Street:
“a bare bulb in the ceiling, wooden floors full of malignant nails … the only
thing I was sure of was that I wanted to write.”
There was another marriage, a brief one, to a fellow writer.
Then she became the second wife of Kingsley Amis, an acclaimed and fashionable
novelist. Jane wanted love, sexual and every kind; she said so all her life,
and she was bold in saying so, because it is always taken as a confession of
weakness. The early years of the Amis marriage were happy and companionable.
There is a picture of the couple working at adjacent typewriters. It belies the
essential nature of the trade. Howard was strung on the razor wire of a paradox.
She wanted intimacy, and writing is solitary. She wanted to be valued, and
writers often aren’t. The household was busy and bohemian. She kept house and
cooked for guests, some of them demanding, some of them long-stayers. She was a
kind, inspiring stepmother to Amis’s three children. The marriage was, as
Martin Amis has said, “dynamic”, but the husband’s work was privileged, whereas
Jane’s was seen as incidental, to be fitted around a wife’s natural domestic
obligations.
During those years she wrote a number of witty novels, full
of the pleasures of life, while enduring periods of deep misery. Her husband
was making money and collecting applause, but she kept faith with her talent.
Well-bred people did not make a fuss or make a noise, her mother had told her,
even when having a baby. That is a prescription for emotional deadness, not
creative growth. But if pain can be survived, it can perhaps be channelled and
put to work. In her novels Howard described delusion and self-delusion. She
totted up the price of lies and the price of truth. She saw damage inflicted,
damage reflected or absorbed. She had learned more from Austen than from her
mother. Comedy is not generated by a writer who sails to her desk saying, “Now
I will be funny”. It comes from someone who crawls to her desk, leaking shame
and despair, and begins to describe faithfully how things are. In that fidelity
to the details of misery, one feels relish. The grimmer it is, the better it
is: slowly, reluctantly, comedy seeps through.
The journalist Angela Lambert has asked why The Long View is
not recognised as one of the great novels of the 20th century. One might ask
why Howard’s whole body of work is not rated more highly. It’s true her social
settings are limited; so are Jane Austen’s. As in Austen’s novels, a busy
underground stream of anxiety threatens to break the surface of leisured lives.
The anxiety is about resources. Have I enough? Enough money in my purse? Enough
credit with the world? In various stories, Howard’s characters teeter on the
verge of destitution. Elsewhere, money flows in from mysterious sources. But
her characters do not command those sources, nor comprehend them. Emotionally,
financially, her vulnerable heroines live from hand to mouth. Even if they have
enough, they do not know enough.
Their unarmed state, their vulnerability, gives them a claim
on the sternest sensibility. Why should I care, some readers ask, about the
trials of the affluent? But readers who do not care about rich characters do
not care about poor ones either. Howard’s novels can be resisted by those who
see the surface and find it bourgeois. They can be resisted by those who do not
like food, or cats, or children, or ghosts, or the pleasures of pinpoint
accuracy in observation of the natural or manufactured world: by those who turn
a cold shoulder to the recent past. But they are valued by those open to their
charm, their intelligence and their humour, who can listen to messages from a
world with different values from ours.
But the real reason the books are underestimated – let’s be
blunt – is that they are by a woman. Until very recently there was a category
of books “by women, for women”. This category was unofficial, because
indefensible. Alongside genre products with little chance of survival, it
included works written with great skill but in a minor key, novels that dealt
with private, not public, life. Such novels seldom try to startle or provoke
the reader; on the contrary, though the narrative may unfold ingeniously, every
art is employed to make the reader at ease within it. Understated, neat, they
do not employ what Walter Scott called “the Big Bow-wow strain”. Reviewing
Austen, and admiring her, Scott saw the problem: how can such work be evaluated,
by criteria meant for noisier productions? From the 18th century onward, these
novels have been a guilty pleasure for many readers and critics – enjoyed, but
disparaged. There is a hierarchy of subject matter. Warfare should get more
space than childbirth, though both are bloody. Burning the bodies rates higher
than burning the cakes. If a woman engages with “masculine” subjects, it has
not saved her from being trivialised; if a man descends to the domestic, writes
fluently of love, marriage, children, he is praised for his empathy, his
restraint; he is commended as intrepid, as if he had ventured among the savages
to get secret knowledge. Sometimes, perfection itself invites contempt. She
gets that polish because she takes no risks. Her work shines because it’s so
small. I work on two inches of ivory, Austen said, ironically: much labour, and
small effect.
Time has sanctified Austen, though there are still those who
don’t see what the fuss is about. It helps that she was a good girl, with the
tact to die young; with nothing to say about her private life and her heart
guarded from examination, critics had to look at her text. Modern women have
less tidy careers. When Howard died in 2014, aged 90, the Daily Telegraph’s
obituary described her as “well-known for the turbulence of her personal life”.
Other “tributes” dwelled on her “failed” love affairs. In male writers, affairs
testify to irrepressible virility, but in women they are taken to indicate
flawed judgment. Cecil Day-Lewis, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler, Laurie Lee
and Ken Tynan were among her conquests; though of course, the world thought
they had conquered her. Divorces and breakups may damage the male writer, but
the marks are read as battle scars. His overt actions may signal stupidity and
lust, but the assumption is that at some covert level he acts to serve his art.
A woman, it is assumed, does rash things because she can’t help it. She takes
chances because she knows no better. She is judged and pitied, or judged and
condemned. Judgments on her life contaminate judgments on her work.
Though authors such as Virginia Woolf and Katherine
Mansfield opened up a new way of witnessing the world, good books by women
still fell out of print and vanished into obscurity: not just because, as in
the case of male writers, fashion might turn, but because they had never been
properly valued in the first place. In the 1980s, feminist publishing put them
back on the shelves. Elizabeth Taylor, after a period of neglect, has come back
into fashion. Barbara Pym was neglected, rediscovered, consigned again to being
a curiosity. Sometimes a contemporary writer has to hold up a mirror for us; we
have learned to read Elizabeth Bowen through the prism of Sarah Waters’s regard
for her. Anita Brookner’s critical fortunes show that it is possible to win a
major prize, be widely read and still be undervalued. For all her late success,
and perhaps because of it, Howard’s work is misperceived. Her virtues are
immaculate construction, impeccable observation, persuasive but inexorable
technique. They may not make a noise in the world, but every writer can learn
from them. In teaching writing myself, there is no author I have recommended
more often, or more to the bewilderment of students. Read her, is my advice,
and read the books that she herself read. In particular, deconstruct those
little miracles, The Long View and After Julius. Take them apart and try to see
how they are done.
I can’t remember the exact date I met Jane. It was at the
Royal Society of Literature, in the late 1980s, at one of their meetings at
Hyde Park Gardens. The RSL is lively now and based elsewhere, but in those days
the gaunt premises, their lease shortening, seemed left behind by the world.
Knowing the dust and decrepitude of the upper floors, the empty chill of the
basement beneath, I was not awed by the grand neglected rooms, nor the grand
neglected Fellows who stood looking out on to the terrace. Sometimes when you
admire a writer you are disinclined to find out much about them. I must have
seen photographs of Jane, but ignored them. My mental picture was of a small
sinuous creature, with a gamine haircut and wide eyes like a lynx; someone who
spoke in a dry whisper, if she spoke at all. The reality was quite different.
Jane was tall and stately, with a deep, old-fashioned, actressy voice. She had
the feline quality I had imagined, but it was leonine, tawny, dominant, not
slinking nor fugitive. If she had purred, the room might have shaken. She was
an impressive and powerful woman.
But in conversation, I found, she was kind and unassuming.
She never forgot, in her fiction, what it was like to be a young girl, and she
carried an ingénue spirit inside a wise and experienced body. She seemed
self-conscious about the impression she created, and anxious – not to efface
it, but to check and modify it, so as to put others at their ease. If they were
not at ease, they could not show themselves and there would be nothing for her
to carry away. She was interested in people, but not simply in a beady-eyed
writer’s way. When she took the trouble to make a friend of me, she also made a
friend of my husband, who is neither an artist nor a writer. She dedicated her
last published book to us, jointly. It seemed too much. She had given me years
of delight and instruction, and I felt I had not repaid her. In those years I
was short of energy for friendship, though she must have seen I was not short
of capacity. Our work did not make much of a fit, and we appeared together just
once, at a small bookshop event. She read beautifully. Her professional
training shone through, her voice strong and every pause judged to a
microsecond. But she read unaffectedly, smiling, with pleasure in the
audience’s enjoyment. I was happy that the Cazalet novels brought her new fans.
As much as her style, I admired her tenacity. She was still writing when she
died: a book called Human Error. I wish I had asked her which of the selection
available she had chosen as her focus.
No doubt the best conversations are those that never quite
occur. I sensed that we both lived in hope, and had frequently lived on it. I
always felt there was something I should ask her, or something she meant to ask
me. The morning after she died, I was one interviewee among many, talking about
her on the radio. I was working in Stratford-on-Avon, so used the RSC’s studio.
It was a last-minute, short-notice arrangement and I had only just learned of
her death, so I may not have been eloquent. But I saw her face very clearly as
I spoke. She had acted in Stratford as a girl, and she would have liked what
the day offered: the dark wintry river, the swans gliding by, and behind
rain-streaked windows, new dramas in formation: human shadows, shuffling and
whispering in the dimness, hoping – by varying and repeating their errors – to
edge closer to getting it right. In Jane’s novels, the timid lose their
scripts, the bold forget their lines, but a performance, somehow, is scrambled
together; heads high, hearts sinking, her characters head out into the dazzle
of circumstance. Every phrase is improvised and every breath a risk. The play
concerns the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of love. Standing ovations await
the brave.
Elizabeth Jane Howard obituary
Novelist known for The Cazalet Chronicle which was adapted
into a popular BBC television series
Janet Watts
Thu 2 Jan 2014 19.40 GMT First published on Thu 2 Jan 2014
19.40 GMT
For much of a career spanning more than 60 years, the writer
Elizabeth Jane Howard, who has died aged 90, suffered a certain condescension
from literary editors as a writer of "women's novels". But it did not
deter her. She herself described her readers as "women and educated
men", and expressed "puzzlement" when Margaret Drabble left her
out of her 1985 edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
Jane (as she was always called) achieved a triumph in her
70s with The Cazalet Chronicle, a highly praised tetralogy of novels set in the
England of 1937-47. The first two books, The Light Years (1990) and Marking
Time (1991), became an acclaimed BBC TV series, The Cazalets, in 2001; though
the BBC then cancelled a planned second series of the last two books, Confusion
(1993) and Casting Off (1995). Jane bore both triumph and disappointment with
the dignity that had already seen her through decades of literary acclaim and
disdain.
She herself thought her work had improved with age. These
novels show her maturity as a compelling storyteller, shrewd and accurate in
human observation, with a fine ear for dialogue and an evident pleasure in the
English language and landscape. She was thoroughly at home in their setting,
which was just the sort of upper-middle-class English family, London locations
and country houses (the main one is called Home Place) in which her own roots
lay. In a later novel, Falling (1999), she chiselled a perfect structure for a
story that contains many of the torments of love, betrayal and misjudgment that
bedevilled her own life.
Like the Cazalets, her background was privileged but not
easy. She was born in London. Her father, David, was a timber merchant who had
swept her mother, Katharine, off her feet when she was a dancer in Diaghilev's
Ballets Russes. The family lived in a big house in Notting Hill with a tribe of
servants; there were enchanting childhood summers in her grandparents' country
house in Sussex. Her education was typical of her class and time: she had
governesses at home while her two younger brothers went away to school.
This lack of formal education fed her self-doubt, but she
showed great self-discipline and dedication in her chosen profession. Her
output was prolific and her books achieved popularity and recognition. Her
first novel, The Beautiful Visit (1950), won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize; as
well as further novels she wrote short stories, articles, television plays,
film scripts and a book on food with Fay Maschler. She also edited several
anthologies. Her contributions to literary life included organising the
Cheltenham and Salisbury festivals. She was made a CBE in 2000.
Jane was a very handsome, impressive woman. Though she
looked rather grand, she did not use hauteur; there was a disarming candour and
even humility in the way she talked about herself. It took her almost a
lifetime, years of which she spent in psychotherapy, to come to terms with her
relationship with her mother, who – she believed – did not like her. This
experience, she said with harsh honesty, had made her "a tart for affection"
for most of her life. Her striking looks, intelligence and varied talents
brought her many admirers.
As a young woman she acted and modelled, and later she
broadcast, cooked, sewed, gardened and decorated houses with flair and skill.
But looking back, she declared that she had made a complete hash of her life,
admitting and regretting her mistakes.
She was a bit of a bolter, as she was the first to admit:
she married three times. The first, in 1942, was to Peter Scott, later a
world-renowned naturalist and at that time a naval officer and war hero. She
had her only child, Nicola, at 19. When Nicola was three, Jane – unhappy in her
marriage and feeling unable to give her daughter as good a life as her
distinguished husband could – left them both, an abandonment that brought deep
difficulties between mother and daughter for many years, although they found
resolution.
The poets Laurie Lee and Cecil Day-Lewis, whose wives were
her friends, were among her lovers after her first divorce. Yet if there was
duplicity in her makeup there were also qualities that attracted devoted
friendship. Both the Lees and both the Day-Lewises wanted her to be godmother
to their daughters; she accepted both requests. Day-Lewis wrote his last poem
on her table, while staying as a guest in her house in the weeks before his
death.
Her second marriage, to James Douglas-Henry in 1959, was for
Jane a disaster of which, even in her many frank interviews, she could barely
speak. But she indicated that he was unfaithful, did not make love to her, and
was only interested in her money, of which she had very little. She left him
after five years.
As an innovative director of the Cheltenham literary
festival of 1962, she invited her fellow novelist Kingsley Amis to discuss sex
and censorship in literature with Carson McCullers and Joseph Heller. The
attraction between Amis and herself was powerful enough to end both their
marriages. Their 18-year relationship made a gut-wrenching but fascinating
public story, which began with romantic passion, high hopes and an elopement to
Spain. It looked like a perfect match. One reason why she loved him, she said,
was that he made her laugh. They married in 1965.
For eight years the couple held court to their friends and
colleagues in a beautiful house on Hadley Common in Barnet. Jane later revealed
that under the appearance of effortless glamour, she was single-handedly trying
to do everything, from repairing and decorating the house to tending the huge
garden. But she was not writing very much. Kingsley did that. His two
adolescent sons, her brother and mother and a painter friend lived with them,
and she produced regular meals for the household and spectacular ones for
weekend guests, while struggling to cope with the idiosyncrasies of her husband.
Years later it pleased her greatly when her stepson Martin Amis expressed
gratitude for her contribution to his life as a writer. It was Jane who spotted
ability and ambition in the teenage layabout. She got him reading (Jane Austen
was the first breakthrough), and thence to Oxford. In his memoirs, Martin
placed her – as a novelist – in the august company of Iris Murdoch, praising
her "poetic eye" and "penetrating sanity".
The collapse of her third marriage was understandable, with
its many pressures, but no less painful for that. In its latter years,
especially after they moved from Barnet to Hampstead because Kingsley was
missing his London life and friends, it became clear to Jane that he had come
to dislike her. Nonetheless it was brave of her to leave him in 1980. This was
not the first time she had been hurt by a man she had loved, but starting again
was now a more daunting prospect. She was 57, and – although she did not seek
or receive Amis's financial help – not as well-off as she seemed.
She planned her departure with a stratagem designed to
minimise the hurt to Kingsley, which nevertheless outraged him. She went to a
health farm for 10 days, thinking it would help him get used to her not being
around; then, on the day she was due back, she had a note delivered to the
house from her solicitor to say she was not returning. She went to live in
Camden Town, in a house facing the traffic of a rat-run.
Kingsley never spoke to her again. His undisguised animosity
to Jane figured in his late novels, and resurfaced in letters and biographies
published after his death. The cruelty, subtlety and sharpness of this drama as
it played out also proved worthy of her own pen, and the relationship and its
protagonists appear several times in her fiction.
In 1990 Jane moved out of London and finally settled in a
lovely old house in Suffolk, with some land, a riverbank and an island. There,
she wrote, read, gardened, did her beautiful patchwork and tapestry, cherished
her dog and her plants, and welcomed her friends, godchildren and family at
weekends.
Her frank and detailed autobiography, Slipstream (2002),
revealed how closely the Cazalet family was modelled on her own and that the
roots of her novel Falling were in her own encounter with a conman. In November
2013, a fifth Cazalet novel, All Change, was published, shortly after a
long-running dramatisation of the original quartet on BBC Radio 4.
In her later years she seemed blessed with a peace and
pleasure that had hitherto eluded her. She was alone, and made it clear that
she would have preferred not to be. But reconciliation had ended the years of
estrangement with Nicola, and she basked in the affection of her daughter, four
grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren, who all survive her.
Jane once admitted that writing was the most
"frightening" thing she did, and that she did not enjoy it. "I
find it much too anxious a business," she said. She once tried to give it
up altogether. But she couldn't. "When you write something which comes
off, it's a feeling like no other," she said. "It's like being
visited by something outside yourself."
• Elizabeth Jane Howard, writer, born 26 March 1923; died 2
January 2014
