Elizabeth Jane Howard

Elizabeth Jane Howard (26 March 1923 – 2 January 2014), was an English novelist. She wrote 15 novels, including the best-selling series The Cazalet Chronicle.

Early life 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 drew heavily 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 co-wrote an episode of 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".

Personal life Howard was age 19 when she married conservationist Sir Peter Scott, the only child of Antarctic explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott and the sculptor Kathleen Bruce, in 1942; they had a daughter, Nicola. 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 became pregnant while with Koestler and had an abortion. After breaking with Koestler, Howard had love affairs with 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 the 2000 Birthday Honours. She died at home on 2 January 2014, aged 90.