Elizabeth Jane Howard
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Elizabeth Jane Howard (born 26 March 1923, London) is an English novelist. She was an actress and a model before becoming a novelist.
In 1951, she won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her first novel, The Beautiful Visit. Six further novels followed, before she embarked on her best known work, a four novel family saga set in wartime England. The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off were serialised by Cinema Verity for BBC television as The Cazalets.
She has also written a book of short stories, Mr Wrong, and edited two anthologies.
She married Sir Peter Scott in 1942; they had a daughter, Nicola, then divorced in 1951. A second marriage, to Jim Douglas-Henry in 1958, was brief. Her third marriage to novelist Kingsley Amis lasted from 1965 to 1983. She now lives in Bungay in Suffolk and was awarded a CBE in 2000.[1]. Her autobiography, Slipstream, was published in 2002.
In Autumn 2007, the Marxist academic, Terry Eagleton was widely quoted in the British press for his critical remarks about Martin and Kingsley Amis as included in the introduction to a new edition of his book, Ideology. He quotes Martin Amis as saying: "There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children." Eagleton responded by calling these "[n]ot the ramblings of a British National Party thug, [...] but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world," who has learnt more from his father, "a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals", than "how to turn a shapely phrase".
Howard responded with a letter to the Daily Telegraph pointing out that for an anti-semitic homophobe, it was slightly unusual for the only guests at the Howard-Amis nuptials to be either gay or Jewish [2]: "Kingsley was never a racist, nor an anti-Semitic boor. Our four great friends who witnessed our wedding were three Jews and one homosexual."
[edit] Bibliography
- (1950) The Beautiful Visit. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-60977-7.
- (1951) We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories. Jonathan Cape.(a collection containing three stories by Howard and three by Robert Aickman)
- (1956) The Long View. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-60318-3.
- (1959) The Sea Change. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-60319-1.
- (1965) After Julius. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-61037-6.
- (1969) Something in Disguise. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-61744-3.
- (1972) Odd Girl Out. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-224-00661-4.
- (1975) Mr. Wrong. Jonathan Cape.
- (1982) Getting it Right. Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 0-241-10805-5.
- (1990) The Light Years. Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-53875-7.
- (1991) Marking Time. Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-56596-7.
- (1993) Confusion. Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-57582-2.
- (1995) Casting Off. Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-60757-0.
- (1999) Falling. Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-73020-8.
- (2002) Slipstream. Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-90349-8.
- Three Miles Up and Other Strange Stories. ISBN 1-872621-75-9.contains the three stories included in We Are for the Dark, plus Mr Wrong.
