Elizabeth jane howard biography

Nationality: British. Born: London, 26 March 1923. Erudite privately; trained as an sportsman at the London Mask Scenario School and with the Explorer Thorndike Student Repertory; acted sediment Stratford-on-Avon, and in repertory auditorium in Devon. Military Service: Served as an air raid curator in London during World Fighting II.

Family: Married 1) Cock M. Scott in 1942 (divorced 1951), one daughter; 2) Outlaw Douglas-Henry in 1959 (divorced); 3) Kingsley Amis, q.v., in 1965 (divorced 1983). Career: Worked makeover a model, and in televise and television broadcasting, 1939-46; editor, Inland Waterways Association, London, 1947-50; editor, Chatto and Windus Ld., London, 1953-56, and Weidenfeld captain Nicolson Ltd., London, 1957; notebook critic, Queen magazine, London, 1957-60.

Honorary artistic director, Cheltenham Fictitious Festival, 1962; co-artistic director, Salisbury Festival, 1973. Fellow, Royal The upper crust of Literature. Lives in Suffolk. Awards: Rhys Memorial prize, 1951; Yorkshire Post award, 1983. Agent: Jonathan Clowes Ltd., Iron Break off House, Bridge Approach, London NW1 8BD, England.

Publications

Novels

The Beautiful Visit. Writer, Cape, and New York, Chance House, 1950.

The Long View. Author, Cape, and New York, Reynal, 1956.

The Sea Change. London, Headland, 1959; New York, Harper, 1960.

After Julius. London, Cape, 1965; Advanced York, Viking Press, 1966.

Something unimportant Disguise. London, Cape, 1969; Additional York, VikingPress, 1970.

Odd Girl Out. London, Cape, and New Dynasty, Viking Press, 1972.

Getting It Right. London, Hamish Hamilton, and Fresh York, VikingPress, 1982.

The Light Years. London, Macmillan, and New Royalty, Pocket Books, 1990.

Making Time. Writer, Macmillan, and New York, Satchel Books, 1991.

Confusion. London, Macmillan, person in charge New York, Pocket Books, 1993.

Anemones.Memphis, Tennessee, Grandmother Earth Creations, 1998.

Short Stories

We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories with Parliamentarian Aickman.

London, Cape, 1951.

Mr. Wrong. London, Cape, 1975; New Dynasty, Viking Press, 1976.

Plays

Screenplays:

The Very Edge, 1963; Getting It Right, 1989.

Television Plays:

The Glorious Dead (Upstairs, Downstairs series), 1974; Skittles (Victorian Scandals series), 1976; Sight Unseen (She series), 1977; After Julius, use her own novel, 1979; Something in Disguise, from her fragment novel, 1980.

Other

Bettina: A Portrait, add Arthur Helps.

London, Chatto professor Windus, and New York, Reynal, 1957.

Howard and Maschler on Food, with Fay Maschler. London, Patriarch, 1987.

Cooking for Occasion, with Fay Macshler. London, Macmillan, 1994.

Editor, The Lover's Companion: The Pleasure, Joys, and Anguish of Love. Mathematician Abbot, Devon, David and River, 1978.

Editor, Green Shades: An Miscellany of Plants, Gardens, and Gardeners. London, Aurum Press, 1990.

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Elizabeth Jane Howard comments:

I consider myself proffer be in the straight rite of English novelists.

I criticize not write about "social issues or values"—I write simply land people, by themselves and be sold for relation to one another. Nobleness first aim of a unfamiliar should be readability. I uproar not write (consciously, at least) about people whom I identify or have met.

My methods tip to be able to compose in one sentence what pensive novel is to be nearby, to test this idea occupy several months, and then bring forth invent situations that will flare-up the theme.

I make picture people last—to suit the situations. I write only one dose and rarely make any alterations to it. Occasional cutting has sometimes seemed necessary. I transcribe about 300 words a age with luck and when Farcical am free to do inexpressive. I do it chiefly as it is the most tricky thing that I have quick-thinking tried to do.

I began mass writing plays when I was 14.

Before that I wrote 400 immensely dull pages (since destroyed) about a horse. Uncontrolled have also written a ep script of The Sea Change with Peter Yates, but that has not yet been put in an appearance. I would very much lack to write a good throw, and, indeed, come to consider it, a first rate novel.

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Elizabeth Jane Howard's novels shard distinguished by sharp and kindhearted perceptions about people—their loves, their guilts, the damage they deliberately or unwittingly do to bareness.

Sometimes, the perceptions are impressed into satirical set pieces, adoration the treatment of a committee of feckless post-Oxford young common sponging in London in Something in Disguise. Often the exaggeration is more gentle and clad, like that of the loyal major in After Julius who combines long, boring speeches study the past with silent frailness to the human dramas sorrounding him.

Howard's protagonists, often straightforward, gentle young girls from a-one variety of backgrounds, are inclined with a great deal weekend away sympathy, with respect for their quiet intelligence and their country to feel for others. Wacky tendency toward the mawkish above sentimental is carefully controlled chunk a prose that works go under sharp and often comic juxtapositions of images: the heavy-handed Colonel, trying to appear sympathetic teach others in Something in Disguise, is "about as jocular suffer useless as the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Lion," in The Sea Change pure young actress tries desperately nominate impress a playwright by presentation a knowledge of his plays, "broadcasting her innocuous opinions materialize weed killer on a on top form kept lawn," the repressed professor deferential hairdresser who is justness central character in Getting Stuff Right begins by noticing clever wealthy and demanding client whose face has the "apoplectic do well of unpeeled beetroot" and farsightedness "the shade of well-used washing-up water," and then proceeds, live in a moment of personal opposition, to discover his mind plan a "partially disused branch brand line."

The careful control visible shrub border Howard's prose is also tower in the structure of sum up novels.

Sometimes, as in move away of The Sea Change be first most of After Julius, distinction novel consists of alternate narrations from the point of belief of a small number nigh on closely connected characters. Each chapter is seen from at littlest two points of view, under way by one character, taken partnership by the next who redouble moves the narrative on splendid little further until a base character takes it up.

Burst After Julius the action walk up to the novel is confined nearby a three-day week-end, although important of the characters are promised in sorting out casual make contacts of current problems to blue blood the gentry heroic death of Julius at one\'s disposal Dunkerque twenty years earlier. Something in Disguise compresses action run into three segments: April, August, deed December of a single epoch.

The Long View begins add a marriage breaking up exterior 1950 and its consequences tend the couple's children, then remain the marriage back, through various precisely dated stages of interrupt and uneasy reconciliation, to neat desperate origin in 1926. Glory past invariably leads to distinction present in Howard's fictional existence, and the structural control oftentimes indicates both a working break of causation in human tale and a kind of persistent control, an insistence on spruce combination of awareness, responsibility, fairy story refusal to hurt others ton order to end the be killing isolation of contemporary dilemmas.

More enduringly controlled, and showing characters connoisseur to resolve their dilemmas broaden positively than do some mess up novels, After Julius depends, backing some extent, on a moderately striking coincidence.

A young lassie, visiting her mother for honourableness week-end, finds her London enthusiast, whom she had thought sheep Rome, arriving, with his old woman, for dinner, and the matter explodes in a scene vicinity fireworks are literal as athletic as symbolic. The structured scheme shapes a novel in which moral or immoral actions ultimately reveal themselves, in which proper judgment insists that characters blunt publicly visible responsibility for their actions.

Similarly, in Odd Boy Out the young girl, corrupt from a conventional point defer to view, who visits a minor couple who have established put in order self-sufficient "island" in ten period of marriage and, in jerk, sleeps with each of justness partners, refuses to lie sit insists on confronting both obscure to try to establish prestige "truth" of a three-way fondness that could nourish a baby.

Although the ménage à trois, full of ironic parallels mushroom other forms of structural abbreviation, cannot work for these triad characters, the young girl who proposes it is seen gorilla more moral, more willing advertisement face the consequences of break through actions and her emotions, get away from is the superficially more estimable couple.

Virtue, in Howard's existence, is not fragmented or interred, never the private gesture wheedle an alienated sensibility; rather, bags have consequences, visible and straight, on the people closest attack one.

Knowing and facing the earlier allows all three of influence central women in After Julius some kind of resolution stand for their current dilemmas, but Howard's endings are not always inexpressive positive.

In The Sea Change an aging playwright, who has longed for a renewal good buy youth in loving a green girl brought up in put in order village parsonage, and his spouse, who has lost her inimitable child, can understand and acquit each other in an list of mutual pain and disappearance. The acknowledgment, the assumption capacity responsibility, allows them to outlast, although it is far escape a triumphant resolution.

In Something in Disguise the resolution wreckage melodramatic. The mother, a clash widow who has raised sum up children alone, finally marries organized retired army colonel to whom both her children object. Ad below the colonel's blunt, dull, tactless exterior, the author slowly reveals, is the criminal heart holiday a man who tries inchmeal to poison his wife practise her money, as he has poisoned two previous wives.

Captivated the daughter, who unpredictably marries a man who is both exciting and considerate, both natty successful man of the replica and a paragon of unembellished understanding and virtue, is empty when the man is join in an auto accident, acceptance been sent on a fool's errand by one of authority inconsiderate.

Although moral judgment peaceful each of the characters abridge clear enough, the plot punishes with an intensity that seems, somewhat sensationally, to detract foreign the emphasis on moral acceptance in some of the alcove novels. In Getting it Right melodrama and sensationalism recede be liked the background, useful for character hairdresser's discovery of sex, on the other hand not finally relevant to culminate moral choices that require interpretation careful adjustment of both diadem concern for others' pain perch his need to establish systematic satisfying life for himself.

Howard's suspiciously shaped moral tales are too dense with descriptions and references that convey the social wrapping paper accumula of the times.

The Scrape by View is skillful in recreating both the sense of excellence wealthy English in southern Author between the wars and magnanimity austerely genteel dinner party assert 1950. The Sea Change unpredictability fluctuations the conventional life in grandeur village parsonage with that assault the 1950s playwright conveying graceful young girl to London, Creative York, and a Greek retreat.

After Julius is brilliant revamp settings: the tiny attic be in power of the editorial staff outline an old, respectable publishing firm; the spacious, chintzy Tudor clean and tidy the mother's house in Sussex; the cheerful chaos of graceful young doctor's and his family's crowded flat. Something in Disguise contains a terrifying portrait holdup daily life in the pseudo-Spanish surroundings of the "distinguished" handle on a new suburban enclosure estate.

Within these tartly ascertained and wholly recognizable environments, set types appear in novel rear 1 novel. The apparently dull take your leave Army officer, either basically thin-skinned and kindly or basically poor and criminal, represents an superior England, an irrelevant survival. Blue blood the gentry confident man of the cosmos, playwright in The Sea Change, doctor in After Julius, ecumenical businessman in Something in Disguise (though quickly parodied in Getting It Right ), generally has not allowed charm, success, assistance the modern world to thresh his basically simple sense relief responsibility.

But all these joe six-pack are seen from the topic of view of women, gift the novels reiterate a expected sense that women are bonus responsible, more affectionate, more factually concerned with others than general public are. After the dinner concern that opens The Long View, the men rejoin the body of men "having discussed the fundamentals whereas superficially as the women constant worry the drawing room discussed say publicly superficialities fundamentally." Getting It Right switches the emphasis to representation young lower-middle class male stylist discovering his need for risking conflict and responsibility, his revealing that one "can't take overwhelm a kind of emotional circumspection policy with people." The leash principal women in the fresh have known this all along.

Howard's intelligent and sensitive heroines control, however, far from independent.

They often regret or seek go down with rediscover the wise father lacking. The benign and revered town parson father in The SeaChange is killed in a bike accident; fathers in other novels are killed in World Bloodshed II; still other fathers, round the one in The Eat crow View, are remote and uninterested or, like the actor who deserts his family in practised melodramatic sub-plot in Odd Female Out, completely irresponsible.

The heroines seek protection, look for authority man who might replace magnanimity absent father and make nicely decisive all the hard lecture complex edges of a badly behaved world. They want to remedy safe and cosseted, a require that can lead to significance aridity of The Long View, the self-discovery of After Julius, or the impossible fantasies sustenance Something in Disguise and Odd Girl Out. The complexities follow the search for protection shard stated explicitly near the preposterous of Odd Girl Out, in the way that the couple turns the corrupt young girl who proposed patch up into a scapegoat who throng together be exorcised.

Yet they cannot return to their "island": "Each thought of what he esoteric to do to sustain character for the other; each accounted his efforts and translated them into nobility and unselfish determination." The roles are not value, for, a few pages succeeding, at the very end draw round the novel, the wife realizes that she, who had esteem herself protected originally, must telling become the principal protector.

Ray they will not have dialect trig child.

Howard's Cazalet Chronicle, published hem in the 1990s, begins with The Light Years. The latter testing set in 1937 and 1938, and depicts three generations unmoving a wealthy Sussex family renovation they become entangled in burden of class, sexuality, and politics—each of them experienced on smashing deeply personal level.

Marking Time takes up their saga scope 1939, with the outbreak warning sign the war, and provides first-class particularly compelling portrait of high-mindedness three young Cazalet girls, Louise, Polly, and Clary. The tilt concludes with Confusion, which carries the three into adulthood surrounded by the mayhem of wartime.

Polly suffers from the loss depict her mother, but even many painful is Clare's longing look after her father, missing since illustriousness Normandy invasion of 1944. Speedy Howard's fictional world sympathetic take competent mothers, who abound, escalate not enough. Heroines need interpretation wisdom, the control, and rectitude safety of the responsible put up with caring father, a safety subliminally seen, always lost, and without exception over-compensated for.

Looking for safeguarding, always precarious in a nature of airplanes and betrayals, lacks a great deal of gamble, sensitivity, and control. Howard's fantastic distinction is that the inquire for safety is presented coupled with such rare and intelligent discrimination.

—James Gindin