For a time known as much for her beauty and care for life as her admired Cazalet novels,Howard emerges from this biography as both vulnerable and formidableArtemis Cooper tells the story of how a friend remonstrated with the elderly Elizabeth Jane Howard after she published her autobiography, Slipstream – there was too much of her life in it, or not enough approximately her work. “I didn’t think it would interest people,” she replied.
Her friend of course said the right, respectful thing, and paying her work the compliment of taking it seriously; he was from a different generation to Howard’s,and our collective cultural life in the UK has undergone a sea-change since she began to write. We are fairly scandalised now by a past era when Howards admirers couldn’t seem to separate her work from her body and her beauty, her self. Jonathan Cape invited her to lunch in 1949 when he bought her first novel, and then chased her round the table; Bob Linscott of Random House in the US ought to gain been interested in the novel but seemed preoccupied by “your floating down a flight of steps as effortlessly as in a dream,or sitting on a sofa in my hotel room with your lovely long legs tucked up under you”. The Sunday Times in 1959 called her “the most beautiful woman novelist living in London”. Imagine any autobiography of a male novelist that hardly mentioned his work apart from as projects accomplished in passing, subordinated to the care for affairs and the social life and the homemaking.
Howard wanted to be adored and was vulnerable to predatory seducers: the men really were having it all their own wayContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com