Elizabeth Jane Howard, CBE (born 26 March 1923, London) is an English novelist. She was previously an actress and a model.
In 1951 she won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for her first novel, The Beautiful Visit. Six further novels followed, before she embarked on her best known work, a four-novel family saga set in wartime England: The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off. The works were serialised by Cinema Verity for BBC television as The Cazalets. Her novel, Getting It Right, was made into a 1989 movie by the same title, directed by Randal Kleiser and starring Jesse Birdsall, Helena Bonham Carter and Jane Horrocks.
She has also written a book of short stories, Mr Wrong, and edited two anthologies.
She married Peter Scott in 1942; they had a daughter, Nicola, then divorced in 1951. At this time she was employed as part-time secretary to the pioneering canals conservation organization the Inland Waterways Association. A second marriage, to Jim Douglas-Henry in 1958, was brief. Her third marriage to novelist Kingsley Amis lasted from 1965 to 1983. Amis's son, Martin Amis, credits Howard with encouraging him to become a more serious reader and writer. She now lives in Bungay in Suffolk and was awarded a CBE in 2000. Her autobiography, Slipstream, was published in 2002.
Read more about Elizabeth Jane Howard: Works
Famous quotes containing the words jane and/or howard:
“Maybe now you, you don’t want to believe it. Maybe you’d like to tell yourself it didn’t happen. But Steve, you’re not the kind of person that can turn your back on something you know is true.”
—Theodore Simonson. Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr.. Jane Martin (Aneta Corseaut)
“The improved American highway system ... isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway ... he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson’s nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)