Elizabeth Jane Howard in 1962. Photograph: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jan/02/elizabeth-jane-howard-dies-90
I've just re-read her first novel "The beautiful visit", which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1950. It remains one of my favourite books, because of the intensity of the writing and the intensity of the main character, a young woman who passionately wants to have experience and a life worth living. The heroine, who remains unnamed, lives a life of narrow shabby genteel poverty with her emotionally cold and professionally undistinguished family (her father is an unsuccessful composer) in London in the years before the First World War. She is invited to visit a family living in the country, who provide such a contrast to her own background that the visit comes to be a lodestone of how life should be. I have read other novels of Howard's, but none of them seem to have the brilliance of this, her first. She is best known for her series of novels about the Cazalet family during the Second World War, but I didn't really like these, although they were a popular success. Or perhaps because they were a popular success?
I am so with you here - both about The beautiful visit and the Cazalet series. Mind you, she is one of the authors whose books I have hung on to, even the ones I wasn't as fond of.
ReplyDeleteAdored The Beautiful Visit, my first experience of her writing. I think I've read all her novels? I adored the Cazalets, have just reserved the last one just published.
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