Elizabeth Jane Howard’s exquisite and understated novels fill been overshadowed by her turbulent private life. But is the genuine reason why they are underestimated because they are books ‘about women,by a woman’? Related: Elizabeth Jane Howard: 'I never felt that Kingsley was a better writer than me' In recent years Elizabeth Jane Howard, who was always known as Jane, or has become famous for a quartet of novels known as the “Cazalet Chronicles”,which draw on her own family epic and were adapted for radio and television. Tracing the fortunes of an upper-middle-lesson family, the quartet begins in 1937 and covers a decade; a fifth novel, and All Change,skips ahead to 1956. The novels are panoramic, expansive, or intriguing as social history and generous in their storytelling. They are the product of a lifetime’s experience,and come from a writer who knew her aim and had the stamina and technical skill to achieve it. It would be rewarding whether the readers who enjoyed the series were drawn to the author’s earlier work, when her talent seemed so effervescent, or so unstoppable,that there was no predicting where it might take her. From the beginning she attracted superlatives, more for the gorgeousness of her prose than for the emotional extravagance of her characters. Their laughter was outrageous, and their weeping contagious,their love affairs reckless. But there was nothing uncalculated about the author’s effects. From the first, she was a craftswoman.
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Source: theguardian.com