Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Getting It Right by Elizabeth Howard Getting It Right by Elizabeth Howard. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6610a33178a82ba1 • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Getting It Right by Elizabeth Howard. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6610a3318eab97fc • Your IP : 116.202.236.252 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Elizabeth Jane Howard: Writer. Elizabeth Jane Howard was a novelist who might have been outstanding, but for her turbulent emotional life. With a good education and better luck with men, she could have written one exceptional novel. As it was, she brought pleasure to thousands of readers, yet it is hard to point to any one of her novels and say, this one, yes, this is a top-class book. She was neither “literary”, nor a consistent bestseller, although the four Cazalet books she wrote in the 1990s did extremely well. Her strengths were her subtle and intelligent voice and the readability, which she once claimed should be a novel’s first aim. She focused on a corner of English life with which her readers could easily identify, was very good at place and setting and detail, and tended to use consistent types, such as the dull, retired Army officer (kindly or criminal), the confident man of the world, and the passive young girl. The Long View (1956) began: “This, then, was the situation. Eight people were to dine that evening in the house at Campden Hill Square. Mrs Fleming had arranged the party (it was the kind of unoriginal thought expected of her, and she sank obediently to the occasion) to celebrate her son’s engagement to June Stoker . . . [who] would be introduced to a company which had otherwise long ceased to discover anything about themselves likely to increase either their animation or their intimacy, and her immediate future with Julian Fleming (a honeymoon in Paris and a flat in St John’s Wood) outlined. In due course they would descend to the dining-room and eat oysters and grouse and cold orange soufflé.” This is a very typical passage, in its Middle England setting, its excellent turn of phrase, its story-telling quality – and its indefinable bleakness. Jane Howard was born in London in 1923. One grandfather was the composer Sir Arthur Somervell. Her mother, a ballet dancer before her unhappy marriage, “lay on the sofa and read until cocktail time”. She resented and undermined her daughter – hence the many women in the novels who lack self-esteem and wait passively for a father-replacement to come along. Howard also read a great deal and was taught at home by governesses, having lasted only two terms at Francis Holland School. Domestic science studies and drama school in Ebury Street, London, were followed by one season in a student rep company in Devon, where Howard was Katherine to Paul Scofield’s Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, and another at Stratford. Having failed to be accepted by the Wrens, she lived in a basement in St John’s Wood, north London, learning to type and working as a model, going at weekends to the Howard home in Sussex . She was by now extremely beautiful and regularly sank into the arms of men who were older and controlling. The first of these was the naturalist Peter Scott, son of Captain Scott and 14 years older than her, whom she married in the spring of 1942 when she was only 19. Her only child, a daughter, Nicola, was born the following February. She abandoned the marriage in 1947 (“happily without bitterness” on either side, Scott would write) and also her child, something which appals most women but about which she was only mildly regretful. She visited her daughter “regularly, but I was not a good mother”: one senses that it is largely to the daughter’s credit that their later relationship flourished. Living in a London bedsitter, Jane Howard took on the job of part-time secretary at the Inland Waterways Association in Gower Street and worked occasionally in radio and television and in publishing. She was, however, “so beautiful that continuous problems arose”, wrote one of her employers. “Little in the way of completely normal business was possible or sensible when she was in the room.” Her first novel, The Beautiful Visit, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize in 1950, is written in the first person and is about a young girl trying to escape the constraints of family life. The original first half was left in a taxi in New York in 1946 and never found. Her lover at this time was the writer Robert Aickman, founder of the Waterways Association, a reserved but, to her, and apparently to many other women, irresistible man of 40 with an almost morbid and definitely peculiar obsession with the past. We Are for the Dark (1951) was a collection of ghost stories they wrote together. Aickman’s obsession with time was to influence all Howard’s work and in particular her next novel, The Long View (1956), a Book Society Choice and in some ways her most memorable book; beautifully and unusually constructed, it works backwards from 1950 to 1926 and although it is obvious at the beginning that the marriage has crumbled, yet the reader is completely absorbed in finding out why. In 1955, as she was finishing this book, Howard fell in love with the writer Arthur Koestler, who on refusing to use contraception absolved himself of all emotional responsibility for her subsequent abortion. The experience would inform her novel After Julius (1965). Later in the summer of 1955 she began an affair with Laurie Lee, going with him on an idyllically happy holiday in Spain (“panic, protection, most of all freedom, happiness, and always your extraordinary beauty” would be remembered by him) before he returned to his wife. There were many other lovers – “every time I fell in love with anyone, they used to make me a reading list but I never caught up with it because I was in love with someone else,” she once said. But in 1959, the year she published her third novel, The Sea Change, Howard made an “inexplicable” second marriage to James Douglas-Henry, an Australian broadcaster, whom she refused ever to talk about. Her affair with Kingsley Amis began in 1962 when he spoke at the Cheltenham Festival of which she was, that year, artistic director. They moved in together the next year and married in 1965, eventually settling in a large house called Lemmons, near Barnet in Hertfordshire. Here Howard cooked, gardened, tried to be a good stepmother, kept house for her brother and invalid mother, and had numerous long-term guests such as Peregrine Worsthorne, the dying Cecil Day-Lewis and the author Elizabeth Taylor, who was also dying. The couple appeared as symbols of successful bourgeois bliss in a Sanderson’s interior design advertising campaign, andHoward wrote Something in Disguise (1969), Odd Girl Out (1972) and the short stories collected in Mr Wrong (1975). In 1976 they moved to Gardnor House in Hampstead, London, but here their relationship crumbled for good and in 1980 she left. One of the incidental sadnesses of the eventual divorce were that she almost lost touch with her stepson, Martin Amis, whom she had encouraged to become a writer. She went to live in a basement in Camden Town and in 1990 moved to Bungay in Suffolk, to a beautiful old house on a river. Here she lived with her beloved Cavalier King Charles spaniel Darcy, keeping her hair long and wearing leggings long after most women of a certain age have given both up, symbols of a new self-confidence, helped by psychoanalysis. Proud that she always earned her own living, she tried to write 300 words every day. Even though she claimed to find writing “frightening”, it remained the most important thing in her life. Apart from her novels, she wrote articles, television scripts, book reviews, gardening columns and, with Fay Maschler, a very good cookery book. She also wrote the screenplay for her 1982 novel Getting it Right. In the early 1990s, she found new fame and success as the author of the four-novel Cazalet Chronicle, a meticulously remembered portrait of her own family in Sussex and in London in the decade after 1937, so becoming a bestselling writer in her seventies. A preoccupation in Howard’s work was that of responsibility towards others and, although a “bolter”, she developed a great sense of loyalty and devotion to her daughter, four grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and was a firm friend to many. “The most important things in life cannot be taught,” she once remarked. “But life is so organised that you get the hang of things just when you’re on the way out. It seems frightfully unfair.” Elizabeth Jane Howard, writer: born London 26 March 1923; married 1942 Peter M Scott (one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1959 James Douglas-Henry (marriage dissolved), 1965 Kingsley Amis (marriage dissolved); died 2 January 2014. Join our new commenting forum. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. 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’? Elizabeth Jane Howard, c1956. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images. Elizabeth Jane Howard, c1956. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty Images. Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 12.53 GMT. 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.” Kingsley Amis And Elizabeth Jane Howard getting married at Marylebone register office in London, 30 June 1965. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images. 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. Anita Brookner, pictured in 2001, shows that ‘it is possible to win a major prize, be widely read and still be undervalued’. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer. 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. BBC1 series The Cazalets (2001). Photograph: John Rogers/BBC. 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 Books In Order. Elizabeth Jane Howard, FRSL, CBE, was one of the most popular novelist from England, who used to write her books based on the fiction and nonfiction genres. Before taking up writing as a career, she had worked as an actor and a model. Author Howard was born on March 26, 1923 in London, England, The United Kingdom. At the age of 19, she married her first husband named Peter Scott in the year 1942. Their daughter named Nicola was born in the following year. In the next couple of years, things were not going well between author Howard and Peter Scott. Therefore, she left him and eventually got divorced in the year 1951. During this time, Howard had started working as a part time secretary for the canals conservation group call the Inland Waterways Association. While working there, she came across Robert Aickman, with whom she went on to collaborate in the future for writing the short story collection titled We Are for the Dark. In her autobiography called Slipstream, published in the year 2002, author Howard has described the short affair that she had with Robert Aickman. The second marriage of author Howard, with Jim Douglas Henry, was very brief. Following this, she met and married for the third time with the reputed novelist named Sir Kingsley Amis. They met with each other while helping in organizing the Cheltenham Literary Festival. This marriage lasted between the years 1965 and 1983. For most part of this marriage, author Howard and Kingsley Amis used to live at Lemmons, which is a Georgian house located in Barnet. While staying there, author Howard wrote one of her novels titled Something in Disguise, which was later published in the year 1969. The stepson of author Howard, named Martin Amis, has given her the credit to encourage him and enabling him to turn into a more serious writer and reader. During the last stages of her life, author Howard used to live in Bungay Suffolk, England. In the year 2000, she was appointed as the CBE. Author Howard breathed her last on January 2, 2014, at her home in Bungay. She died at the age of 90. In the year 1951, author Howard was awarded with the John Llewellyn Prize for her debut book titled The Beautiful Visit. And after writing around 6 more books in her career, she finally embarked on the most popular work of her writing career, The Cazalet Chronicle. In this interesting series, author Howard has described a family saga about the different ways in which the lives of the English people changed during the time of the war years, especially those of the women. The initial 4 volumes of this series were released between the years 1990 and 1995. The fifth book of the series came out in the year 2013, after a gap of 18 years. The initial couple of books were made into a TV serial by Cinema Verity for the BBC Television. It was called as The Cazalets and was broadcast in the year 2001. From the year 2012 onwards, a different version of the TV serial broadcasted by the BBC Radio 4. Apart from writing novels and short stories, author Howard was also involved with writing screenplays for movies. One of the screenplays that she wrote was for the 1989 film titled Getting It Right. This movie was based on her 1982 book having the same name and was directed by the well known director named Randal Kleiser. Author Howard has also written a short story book titled Mr. Wrong, which was released in 1975. Following this, she was associated with the editing work of a couple of anthologies. It is believed that the Cazalet novels are based on the story of author Howard’s own family at the time of the war. All the novels in this series are expansive, paranomic, intriguing, and generous. They are considered as the product of author Howard’s lifetime experience. The critics reviewed that Howard knew what her aim was while writing the books and had the technical skill and stamina to achieve it. Author Howard believed that she was attracted towards superlatives from the very beginning of her career. Her characters showed the emotional extravagance, which was liked by the readers. Their outrageous laughter, reckless love affairs, and contagious weeping, also made them keep reading the books from start to end without stopping. The first novel in the Cazalet Chronicles series written by Elizabeth Jane Howard is titled as ‘The Light Years’. It was released by the Washington Press in the year 1995 after being originally published in the year 1990. In the plot, author Howard has introduced the main characters as the members of the Cazalt family, namely Edward, Villy, Rupert, Hugh, Zoe, Rachel, etc. At the start of the book, it is shown that in the year 1937 the upcoming war seems very near. During such tense situation, the Cazalet family households gear up for the summer pilgrimage to the prestigious family estate located in Sussex. One of the members of the family is Edward, who seems to be in love with his wife Villy, but he does appear to be faithful to her. Hugh, who was serving in the Great War gets wounded. The other members of the large family include the spinster sister named Rachel, and Rupert, who worships his child-bride named Zoe. Author Howard has done a great job in describing the upper middle class family of the Cazalets who have a large group of servants, mistresses, friends, and retainers, apart from the family members. The family is so large that the readers need to keep a scorecard to track each one of them. These large groups of people are shown dealing with the looming Second World War in England between 1937 and 1938. The next book written by Howard in the series is titled as ‘Marking Time’. This book was released in the year 1991 first and then in 1995 by the Washington Square Press. In this book, author Howard takes the readers to the backdrop of the breakout of war in Britain in the year 1939. The main characters depicted in the book include Louise, Polly, Clary, etc., all of whom belong to the Cazalet family. Louise, who turns 16 years old, begins to go to London parties by leaving her cooking school. For 14 year old Polly, the war terrors cannot hinder the physical pains that she feels because of adolescence. On the other hand, Clary is shown holding to the belief that her father is still alive even though he is reported missing since visiting Dunkirk and declared dead. Once again the family is shown trying to cope up with their problems at the time of the war. Leave a Reply. The links beside each book title will take you to Amazon, who I feel are the best online retailer for books where you can read more about the book, or purchase it. Please note that as an Amazon Associate, I earn money from qualifying purchases. 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