‘Who would dare take on Elizabeth Jane Howard’s fans?’ Louisa Young on reviving the Cazalet Chronicles
The author’s new trilogy continues her aunt’s beloved family saga. What would happen next to the sprawling cast of characters ... and could she pull it off? In the late 1980s Elizabeth Jane Howard was wondering what to write next. Jane, as she was always known, was at that time the author of seven novels. Her debut, The Beautiful Visit, had won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1951 when she was 28 years old and The Long View (1956) was one of the first novels written with reverse chronology. Her talent was somewhat overshadowed in a tawdry world by her drop-dead beauty and by her having briefly been an actor (and by the famous lovers and husbands she walked out on, including Sir Peter Scott, the ornithologist and conservationist, in 1946, and Kingsley Amis, who was then himself a famous novelist, in 1983).Stuck, she asked her stepson Martin Amis which of two projects she should go for: an updated version of Sense and
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