Anita Brookner, pictured in 2001, shows that ‘it is possible to win a major prize, be widely read and still be undervalued’. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer

Its feathers were the purest white that I have ever seen. Normally swans have a dirty, aggressive yellow tinge to them close up. But this one was almost luminous. No doubt the best conversations are those that never quite occur. I sensed that we both lived in hope, and had frequently lived on it. I always felt there was something I should ask her, or something she meant to ask me. The morning after she died, I was one interviewee among many, talking about her on the radio. I was working in Stratford-on-Avon, so used the RSC’s studio. It was a last-minute, short-notice arrangement and I had only just learned of her death, so I may not have been eloquent. But I saw her face very clearly as I spoke. She had acted in Stratford as a girl, and she would have liked what the day offered: the dark wintry river, the swans gliding by, and behind rain-streaked windows, new dramas in formation: human shadows, shuffling and whispering in the dimness, hoping – by varying and repeating their errors – to edge closer to getting it right. In Jane’s novels, the timid lose their scripts, the bold forget their lines, but a performance, somehow, is scrambled together; heads high, hearts sinking, her characters head out into the dazzle of circumstance. Every phrase is improvised and every breath a risk. The play concerns the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of love. Standing ovations await the brave. 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". [10] Personal life [ edit ]She wrote a book of short stories, Mr. Wrong (1975), and edited two anthologies, including The Lover's Companion (1978). [1] Autobiography and biographies [ edit ]

All the bohemian splendour revolved around Kingsley. "I think it was wonderful for everyone but Jane," says Sargy Mann. Howard found herself cooking and running a household of eight or more people and writing less and less. Two large chub lurked under the wooden footbridge. She fed a widower swan which approached us very slowly up the narrow stream. She knew, of course, the bird's past history. The apple and willow trees that overhang the stream often hid the body of the swan in its journey, so we could only see the reflection float slowly towards us, upside down. They just had a jolly nice time. Everybody had to do something, so they were doing this." Her father was driven to the office every morning during the depression of the 1930s, when you could park anywhere in Piccadilly. He loved dancing and parties - and women, who fell for him in droves.

a b c Wilson, Frances (30 December 2012). "Elizabeth Jane Howard: interview". The Telegraph . Retrieved 18 April 2014. This was not good preparation for Jane's marriage to the talented, honourable and charming Peter Scott. She was 19, he 32, and she soon knew that she did not love him. He was not practised at intimacy with women, though he had no trouble seducing them. She was lonely, spendthrift and oppressed by her brilliant and dominating mother-in-law, the sculptor Kathleen Scott, who had married Lord Kennet after her first husband died. Elizabeth Jane Howard CBE FRSL (26 March 1923 – 2 January 2014), was an English novelist. She wrote 12 novels including the best-selling series The Cazalet Chronicles. [1] Early life [ edit ] The Beautiful Visit. Jonathan Cape. 1950. ISBN 978-0-224-60977-7. Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize

She put together a panel on sex and literature with Joseph Heller, Carson McCullers and the French novelist Romain Gary. Other organisers added Kingsley Amis, whom she accepted after fierce protest. He came down with his wife, Hilly, who went early to bed, and he sat up talking and drinking with Howard, at first as a social duty, until four in the morning. By the winter theirs was an established liaison: Tom Maschler, the publisher, lent them his house. Martin Amis, in Experience, described how his childhood innocence ended when he was told by his Welsh nanny, "Your father's got a fancy woman up in London". Above all, she strongly dislikes the idea of a comic novel: "The best novels have comedy in them; in Jane Austen there are some very, very funny moments, in situation and in character and dialogue. But they're not comic novels. I think the best comedy is always generated by very depressed people, very sad people, who have an acute awareness of death and suffering, and are using that to make you laugh. Green Shades: An Anthology of Plants, Gardens and Gardeners. Pan Macmillan. 2021. ISBN 978-1529050738.Throughout the 1950s Howard lived apart from her daughter. Nicola, now Nicola Starks, a jewellery designer, says she never objected to this arrangement: "She was just a very beautiful stranger who would visit from time to time." Despite poverty, discouragement, and a seemingly endless succession of brilliant men who regarded her talents as very much less interesting than theirs, she succeeded. Martin Amis wrote in his autobiography, Experience , that "she is, with Iris Murdoch, the most interesting woman writer of her generation. An instinctivist, like Muriel Spark, she has a freakish and poetic eye, and a penetrating sanity." Howard wrote the screenplay for the 1989 movie Getting It Right, directed by Randal Kleiser, based on her 1982 novel of the same name. [8] She also wrote TV scripts for the popular series Upstairs, Downstairs. [1]