Элизабет Джейн Ховард: Жизнь и творчество английской писательницы

English novelist

Elizabeth Jane Howard (26 March 1923 – 2 January 2014), was an English novelist. She wrote 12 novels including the best selling series The Cazalet Chronicle.

Howard's father was Major David Liddon Howard (1896–1958), a timber merchant who followed the work of his own father, Alexander Liddon Howard (1863 1946). Her mother was Katharine Margaret Somervell (1895–1975), a dancer with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and daughter of composer Sir Arthur Somervell. (Howard's brother, Colin, lived with her and her third husband, Kingsley Amis, for 17 years.) Mostly educated at home, Howard briefly attended Francis Holland School before attending domestic science college at Ebury Street and secretarial college in central London. She next collaborated with Robert Aickman, writing three of the six short stories in the collection We Are for the Dark (1951). Her second novel, The Long View (1956), describes a marriage in reverse chronology; Angela Lambert remarked, "Why The Long View isn't recognised as one of the great novels of the 20th century I will never know." The Chronicle was a family saga "about the ways in which English life changed during the war years, particularly for women." It follows three generations of a middle class English family and draws strongly from Howard's own life and memories. Howard wrote the screenplay for the 1989 movie Getting It Right, directed by Randal Kleiser, based on her 1982 novel of the same name. She also wrote TV scripts for the popular series Upstairs, Downstairs. A biography, entitled Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence by Artemis Cooper, was published by John Murray in 2017. A reviewer said it was "strongest in the case it makes for the virtues of Howard's fiction".

Howard was age 19 when she married conservationist Sir Peter Scott, the only child of Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott, in 1942; they had a daughter, Nicola (born 1943). Howard left Scott in 1946 to become a writer, and they were divorced in 1951. In 1955, she fell in love with the writer Arthur Koestler. Howard conceived a child while with Koestler but she had an abortion. After Koestler, Howard had love affairs with the poets Laurie Lee and Cecil Day Lewis, father of the actor Daniel Day Lewis. Howard was friends with both of the men's wives. At the time of her divorce she was employed as part time secretary to the pioneering canals conservation organisation the Inland Waterways Association. There she met and collaborated with Robert Aickman. She described their affair in her autobiography Slipstream (2002). She also had affairs with the critics Cyril Connolly and Kenneth Tynan. Her second marriage, to Australian broadcaster Jim Douglas Henry in 1958, was brief and unhappy. Her stepson, Martin Amis, credited her with encouraging him to become a more serious reader and writer. In later life, Howard lived in Bungay, Suffolk. She was appointed CBE in 2000. She died at home on 2 January 2014, aged 90.