The Long View

Product Information

The arrangement was largely practical, but after Peter Scott remarried and Nicola went to live with her new stepmother, Josie Baird fell seriously ill with TB and Howard started visiting her in hospital. He was a director of the family timber firm, although it would not be quite accurate to say that he or his brother actually worked there: "They were very established and well thought-of but they didn't know how to manage money," Howard says.

Cooper, Artemis ‘’Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence’’, London: John Murray (2016), p.260. Kingsley Amis And Elizabeth Jane Howard getting married at Marylebone register office in London, 30 June 1965. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images In 1969, the Amises bought Lemmons, a Georgian house set in three acres in London's northern suburbs. It sheltered a rambling collection of family and friends: Kit Howard lived there until she died in 1971; Colin shared the house for eight years.

The best part of the day came after the formal interview. We walked in her wonderful garden, which merged into a meadow that ran down past the River Waveney. I made notes that evening: 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 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. In 1975, the household at Lemmons broke up, and the Amises moved to Hampstead, where there was no room for the extended household; it was also too small for their burgeoning resentments. In 1980, she finally left Kingsley by way of a lawyer's letter sent from a health farm whence she had retreated for a week with the quarter-written manuscript of a novel called Getting it Right.

The garden she has made, and the meadow running down to an island in the river behind it, form a private and enchanted world. At the bridge, she waited to feed a widower swan perfectly matched with its reflection on the tranquil water. She didn't know, she said, which of two books she should be writing next. a b c Beauman, Nicola (3 January 2014). "Elizabeth Jane Howard: Writer". The Independent . Retrieved 17 February 2018.a b c Wilson, Frances (30 December 2012). "Elizabeth Jane Howard: interview". The Telegraph . Retrieved 18 April 2014.

She found them so painful that she has never read any of his later work, such as The Old Devils. A volume of his poetry lay out in her study when she was photographed recently, but her favourites among his work are half-forgotten now.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] Amis had been an extraordinarily vigorous and inventive adulterer for most of his marriage. Hilly had retaliated with affairs of her own. But they had three children and were planning to spend a year in Majorca, close to Robert Graves.

She thought this was a first-rate, intelligent answer and gave him Pride and Prejudice. Within an hour, he was demanding to know how it ended. She refused to tell him and he read all the way through. She got him into a crammer in Sussex, assuring the headmaster that he was scholarship material for Oxford, and so he turned out to be. 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." By the mid-1970s, drink or middle age had eroded Amis's capacity in bed, Howard has said. She was resentful and he resented her resentment. While she wrote nothing literary he wrote bitter novels to rid his imagination of her - Jake's Thing and Stanley and the Women. Adams, Matthew (3–4 June 2017). "Talent and torment". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 4 September 2017. Howard thinks of it as her most accomplished novel. Shortly after it was published she received an appreciative postcard in familiar writing: "Have started a new adventure," it read. The signature was "Henry" - the dismissed suitor recognising himself in Falling 's gardener. That was the end of her romantic hopes. Illness, serious and unpleasant, interrupted work on her autobiography.It's difficult to imagine any other famous beauty writing unsqueamishly about a colostomy. Arthritis means that she must rise from her chair with a jerk that, for an instant, makes her face leonine with self-control. She can no longer do much gardening. But, like her books, her house conceals a wealth of vivid delights behind a conventional façade. Anthony Thwaite (9 November 2002). "When will Miss Howard take off all her clothes?". The Guardian . Retrieved 1 November 2010. a b Brown, Andrew (9 November 2002). "Profile: Elizabeth Jane Howard". The Guardian . Retrieved 17 February 2018.