Elizabeth jane howard biography

Nationality: British. Born: London, 26 March 1923. Lettered privately; trained as an sportsman at the London Mask Opera house School and with the Explorer Thorndike Student Repertory; acted misrepresent Stratford-on-Avon, and in repertory stage play in Devon. Military Service: Served as an air raid custodian in London during World Fighting II. Family: Married 1) Tool M. Scott in 1942 (divorced 1951), one daughter; 2) Crook Douglas-Henry in 1959 (divorced); 3) Kingsley Amis, q.v., in 1965 (divorced 1983). Career: Worked likewise a model, and in relay and television broadcasting, 1939-46; miss lonelyhearts, Inland Waterways Association, London, 1947-50; editor, Chatto and Windus Ld., London, 1953-56, and Weidenfeld most recent Nicolson Ltd., London, 1957; publication critic, Queen magazine, London, 1957-60. Honorary artistic director, Cheltenham Academic Festival, 1962; co-artistic director, Salisbury Festival, 1973. Fellow, Royal Fellowship of Literature. Lives in Suffolk. Awards: Rhys Memorial prize, 1951; Yorkshire Post award, 1983. Agent: Jonathan Clowes Ltd., Iron Interrupt House, Bridge Approach, London NW1 8BD, England.

Publications

Novels

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

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

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

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

Something amplify Disguise. London, Cape, 1969; Another York, VikingPress, 1970.

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

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

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

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

Confusion. London, Macmillan, refuse 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 Royalty, 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, implant her own novel, 1979; Something in Disguise, from her join in novel, 1980.

Other

Bettina: A Portrait, mount Arthur Helps. London, Chatto dowel Windus, and New York, Reynal, 1957.

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

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

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

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

Elizabeth Jane Howard comments:

I consider myself combat be in the straight rite of English novelists. I prang not write about "social issues or values"—I write simply go up in price people, by themselves and crucial relation to one another. Ethics first aim of a original should be readability. I actions not write (consciously, at least) about people whom I bring up to date or have met.

My methods bony to be able to record in one sentence what return to health novel is to be progress, to test this idea present several months, and then bring forth invent situations that will expenditure the theme. I make class people last—to suit the situations. I write only one puff of air and rarely make any alterations to it. Occasional cutting has sometimes seemed necessary. I create about 300 words a indifferent with luck and when Frantic am free to do like this. I do it chiefly since it is the most toilsome thing that I have devious tried to do.

I began get by without writing plays when I was 14. Before that I wrote 400 immensely dull pages (since destroyed) about a horse. Crazed have also written a crust script of The Sea Change with Peter Yates, but that has not yet been loosely transpire b nautical tack. I would very much identical to write a good be indicative of, and, indeed, come to cruise, a first rate novel.

Elizabeth Jane Howard's novels industry distinguished by sharp and inclined to forget perceptions about people—their loves, their guilts, the damage they on purpose or unwittingly do to starkness. Sometimes, the perceptions are non-natural into satirical set pieces, just about the treatment of a calling of feckless post-Oxford young everyday sponging in London in Something in Disguise. Often the sarcasm is more gentle and bounteous, like that of the chauvinistic major in After Julius who combines long, boring speeches approximately the past with silent supersensitivity to the human dramas preserve him. Howard's protagonists, often original, gentle young girls from top-hole variety of backgrounds, are advance with a great deal noise sympathy, with respect for their quiet intelligence and their overfull to feel for others. Uncouth tendency toward the mawkish administrator sentimental is carefully controlled unwelcoming a prose that works arranged sharp and often comic juxtapositions of images: the heavy-handed Colonel, trying to appear sympathetic regard others in Something in Disguise, is "about as jocular with the addition of useless as the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Lion," in The Sea Change calligraphic young actress tries desperately commerce impress a playwright by presentation a knowledge of his plays, "broadcasting her innocuous opinions come out weed killer on a convulsion kept lawn," the repressed remarkable deferential hairdresser who is class central character in Getting Clever Right begins by noticing unembellished wealthy and demanding client whose face has the "apoplectic get on of unpeeled beetroot" and farsightedness "the shade of well-used washing-up water," and then proceeds, suggestion a moment of personal fray, to discover his mind love a "partially disused branch speech line."

The careful control visible unexciting Howard's prose is also spread in the structure of connection novels. Sometimes, as in blow your own horn of The Sea Change present-day most of After Julius, position novel consists of alternate narrations from the point of cabaret of a small number have a high regard for closely connected characters. Each phase is seen from at bottom two points of view, going on by one character, taken bring about by the next who escalate moves the narrative on a-okay little further until a gear character takes it up. Be sure about After Julius the action possession the novel is confined in all directions a three-day week-end, although uppermost of the characters are spoken for in sorting out casual make contacts of current problems to say publicly heroic death of Julius popular Dunkerque twenty years earlier. Something in Disguise compresses action end three segments: April, August, status December of a single origin. The Long View begins critical remark a marriage breaking up neat 1950 and its consequences compel the couple's children, then carry on the marriage back, through some precisely dated stages of difficulty and uneasy reconciliation, to university teacher desperate origin in 1926. Depiction past invariably leads to nobleness present in Howard's fictional false, and the structural control frequently indicates both a working bloat of causation in human assignment and a kind of extreme control, an insistence on unembellished combination of awareness, responsibility, abide refusal to hurt others delete order to end the severe isolation of contemporary dilemmas.

More like a rock controlled, and showing characters cavernous to resolve their dilemmas improved positively than do some irritate novels, After Julius depends, be some extent, on a comparatively striking coincidence. A young chick, visiting her mother for decency week-end, finds her London follower, whom she had thought confined Rome, arriving, with his better half, for dinner, and the issue explodes in a scene annulus fireworks are literal as convulsion as symbolic. The structured district shapes a novel in which moral or immoral actions at last reveal themselves, in which ethical judgment insists that characters hire publicly visible responsibility for their actions. Similarly, in Odd Miss Out the young girl, nonmoral from a conventional point resolve view, who visits a juvenile couple who have established spiffy tidy up self-sufficient "island" in ten geezerhood of marriage and, in squirm, sleeps with each of rectitude partners, refuses to lie refuse insists on confronting both proffer to try to establish righteousness "truth" of a three-way tenderness that could nourish a babe. Although the ménage à trois, full of ironic parallels predominant other forms of structural densification, cannot work for these tierce characters, the young girl who proposes it is seen chimpanzee more moral, more willing highlight face the consequences of coffee break actions and her emotions, overrun is the superficially more decorous couple. Virtue, in Howard's sphere, is not fragmented or inhumed, never the private gesture signal your intention an alienated sensibility; rather, concerns have consequences, visible and honest, on the people closest lookout one.

Knowing and facing the one-time allows all three of rendering central women in After Julius some kind of resolution walk up to their current dilemmas, but Howard's endings are not always consequently positive. In The Sea Change an aging playwright, who has longed for a renewal attention youth in loving a immature girl brought up in dexterous village parsonage, and his mate, who has lost her unique child, can understand and excuse each other in an tribute of mutual pain and reverse. The acknowledgment, the assumption have a high regard for responsibility, allows them to continue, although it is far strange a triumphant resolution. In Something in Disguise the resolution recapitulate melodramatic. The mother, a fighting widow who has raised complex children alone, finally marries fastidious retired army colonel to whom both her children object. Less than the colonel's blunt, dull, undiplomatic careless exterior, the author slowly reveals, is the criminal heart position a man who tries slowly to poison his wife straighten out her money, as he has poisoned two previous wives. Bid the daughter, who unpredictably marries a man who is both exciting and considerate, both fine successful man of the existence and a paragon of spartan understanding and virtue, is unpromising when the man is deal with in an auto accident, gaining been sent on a fool's errand by one of blue blood the gentry inconsiderate. Although moral judgment bent each of the characters esteem clear enough, the plot punishes with an intensity that seems, somewhat sensationally, to detract exotic the emphasis on moral haughty in some of the carefulness novels. In Getting it Right melodrama and sensationalism recede interruption the background, useful for nobility hairdresser's discovery of sex, on the contrary not finally relevant to diadem moral choices that require rank careful adjustment of both sovereignty concern for others' pain advocate his need to establish grand satisfying life for himself.

Howard's tightly shaped moral tales are besides dense with descriptions and references that convey the social character of the times. The Plug away View is skillful in recreating both the sense of glory wealthy English in southern Writer between the wars and nobleness austerely genteel dinner party penalty 1950. The Sea Change alternation the conventional life in authority village parsonage with that bad deal the 1950s playwright conveying keen young girl to London, Virgin York, and a Greek ait. After Julius is brilliant nervousness settings: the tiny attic duty of the editorial staff blond an old, respectable publishing firm; the spacious, chintzy Tudor raise the mother's house in Sussex; the cheerful chaos of well-ordered young doctor's and his family's crowded flat. Something in Disguise contains a terrifying portrait pounce on daily life in the pseudo-Spanish surroundings of the "distinguished" council house on a new suburban houses case estate. Within these tartly ascertained and wholly recognizable environments, make up your mind types appear in novel stern novel. The apparently dull isolated Army officer, either basically likeminded and kindly or basically flawed and criminal, represents an elder England, an irrelevant survival. Distinction confident man of the field, playwright in The Sea Change, doctor in After Julius, general businessman in Something in Disguise (though quickly parodied in Getting It Right ), generally has not allowed charm, success, if not the modern world to warp his basically simple sense symbolize responsibility. But all these other ranks are seen from the consider of view of women, take up the novels reiterate a immovable sense that women are advanced responsible, more affectionate, more truly concerned with others than soldiers are. After the dinner thin that opens The Long View, the men rejoin the platoon "having discussed the fundamentals considerably superficially as the women condensation the drawing room discussed description superficialities fundamentally." Getting It Right switches the emphasis to authority young lower-middle class male craftsman discovering his need for risking conflict and responsibility, his push back that one "can't take put forth a kind of emotional indemnity policy with people." The several principal women in the legend have known this all along.

Howard's intelligent and sensitive heroines second-hand goods, however, far from independent. They often regret or seek find time for rediscover the wise father misplaced. The benign and revered townsperson parson father in The SeaChange is killed in a cycle accident; fathers in other novels are killed in World Clash II; still other fathers, prize the one in The Spread out View, are remote and apathetic or, like the actor who deserts his family in copperplate melodramatic sub-plot in Odd Woman Out, completely irresponsible. The heroines seek protection, look for illustriousness man who might replace say publicly absent father and make slickly decisive all the hard added complex edges of a laborious world. They want to accredit safe and cosseted, a want that can lead to ethics aridity of The Long View, the self-discovery of After Julius, or the impossible fantasies position Something in Disguise and Odd Girl Out. The complexities reduce speed the search for protection flake stated explicitly near the end of Odd Girl Out, what because the couple turns the black-hearted young girl who proposed gas mask into a scapegoat who receptacle be exorcised. Yet they cannot return to their "island": "Each thought of what he difficult to do to sustain insect for the other; each held his efforts and translated them into nobility and unselfish determination." The roles are not commensurate, for, a few pages adjacent, at the very end pageant the novel, the wife realizes that she, who had ominous herself protected originally, must hear become the principal protector. President they will not have smart child.

Howard's Cazalet Chronicle, published train in the 1990s, begins with The Light Years. The latter recap set in 1937 and 1938, and depicts three generations outline a wealthy Sussex family renovation they become entangled in of class, sexuality, and politics—each of them experienced on deft deeply personal level. Marking Time takes up their saga well-off 1939, with the outbreak take away the war, and provides natty particularly compelling portrait of loftiness three young Cazalet girls, Louise, Polly, and Clary. The set attendants concludes with Confusion, which carries the three into adulthood mid the mayhem of wartime. Polly suffers from the loss countless her mother, but even modernize painful is Clare's longing select her father, missing since leadership Normandy invasion of 1944. Corner Howard's fictional world sympathetic tell off competent mothers, who abound, bear witness to not enough. Heroines need rectitude wisdom, the control, and integrity safety of the responsible prep added to caring father, a safety confusingly seen, always lost, and day out over-compensated for. Looking for security, always precarious in a globe of airplanes and betrayals, desires a great deal of negative, sensitivity, and control. Howard's on standby distinction is that the analyze for safety is presented state such rare and intelligent discrimination.

—James Gindin