The manners were one way of approaching Howard's excellence as a writer. It was built on close attention. I was of interest primarily as someone who could help her to sell books – and she did send me a treasured note after the piece was published – but there was a sense in which her interest was not entirely instrumental. She wanted to know about people because they mattered. 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.

Publications: 12 novels, including 1950 The Beautiful Visit; '56 The Long View; '59 The Sea Change; '65 After Julius; '69 Something in Disguise, ('82 TV series); '72 Odd Girl Out; '82 Getting It Right; '90-95 The Cazalet Chronicles; '99 Falling. Also short stories, film scripts, television plays, and an autobiography, Slipstream (2002). In later life, Howard lived in Bungay, Suffolk. She was appointed CBE in 2000. She died at home on 2 January 2014, aged 90. [1] Works [ edit ] The following year it won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize for the best novel by anyone under 30. Cape tried to claim 10% as her agent and she squashed him. She had become a professional, but for most of the next decade she could not make a living from her novels, however highly they were praised. 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. verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ I had gone to see her because she had published an autobiography. I didn't, and don't think that her life was as interesting as her books: her characters are more vivid than her lovers, which is how a writer should be. But it made for easy copy. She had been married to Kingsley Amis, wonderfully to start with, and horribly at the end. I remember the most admiring thing she said about him – that he never made excuses for anyone, including himself. So when Howard said she didn’t think that writing about her work “would interest people” she was mixing up some flirtatious self-deprecation with plenty of authentic agonising self-doubt and the knowledge that it was her life that had interested others more than her books. Nonetheless, I wonder how much she would have had to say about her own work. I suspect that she wasn’t that keen on writing about writing, or in reading about it. It’s difficult to imagine Elizabeth Bowen, or Jean Rhys, or Elizabeth Taylor, dismissing their art quite so carelessly, so unstrategically. 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.

The story comes from her newly published autobiography, Slipstream. Shortly after the encounter with the cobbler, she was seduced by the dashing Peter Scott, then commanding a gunboat in the Channel, and son of the polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott, who had died in the Antarctic in 1912. 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. 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 ]For a long time, the household had the confidence and humorous liberality that gathers itself around a dynamic marriage," Martin Amis wrote in Experience. His meeting with the fancy woman had not been propitious: a couple of weeks after the family break-up, when the lovers were still living in a rented flat in Baker Street, he and his brother Philip had arrived at midnight. In 1950s London, Antonia Fleming faces the prospect of a life lived alone. Her children are now adults; her husband Conrad, a domineering and emotionally complex man, is now a stranger. 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.

Howard was hopelessly unfaithful, first with Peter Scott's half-brother. Within five years the marriage had become stranded in antarctic latitudes of distant courtesy. In 1947, she left Scott and their infant daughter Nicola to become a writer. She moved into a flat in a run-down 18th-century building off Baker Street: "I remember my first night there, a bare bulb in the ceiling, wooden floors full of malignant nails, the odour of decay that seeped through the wet paint smell and the unpleasant feeling that everything was dirty except my bedclothes. Above all I felt alone, and the only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to write." The Chronicles were a family saga "about the ways in which English life changed during the war years, particularly for women." They follow three generations of a middle-class English family and draw strongly from Howard's own life and memories. [7] The first four volumes, The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off, were published from 1990 to 1995. Howard wrote the fifth, All Change (2013), in one year; it was her final novel. Millions of copies of the Cazalet Chronicles were sold worldwide. [1] 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". One of his secret pleasures was the loading of social dice against himself. He did not seem for one moment to consider the efforts made by kind or sensitive people to even things up: or if such notions ever occurred to him, he would have observed them with detached amusement, and reloaded more dice.Her second marriage, to Australian broadcaster Jim Douglas-Henry in 1958, was brief. [3] Her third marriage, to novelist Kingsley Amis, whom she met while organising the Cheltenham Literary Festival, [7] lasted from 1965 to 1983. For part of that time, 1968–1976, they lived at Lemmons, a Georgian house in Barnet, where Howard wrote Something in Disguise (1969). [11] Her stepson, Martin Amis, credited her with encouraging him to become a more serious reader and writer. [12] 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. Kit Howard gave her daughter two strikingly unhelpful pieces of advice: "Never refuse your husband - however you feel", and "People of our sort never make any fuss or noise when they are having a baby." Married: 1942-1951 Peter Scott (one daughter, Nicola, born 1943); '57-60 Jim Douglas-Henry; '65-82, Sir Kingsley Amis.

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]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. Colin Howard dislikes this description of Kit but says, "Mother quite obviously preferred her sons [there was another brother, Robin], and couldn't see anything good about Jane. I said once, after reading one of Jane's novels, 'I think she does write rather beautifully', and mother replied, 'It's a pity she doesn't have anything to write about'. And I know that if I had written anything even half as good, she would have been embarrassing in her praise." 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. To write this book, Howard had left her first husband and her daughter, from whom she was estranged for decades as a result. But The Long View is not a flamboyant rebellion. It is full of an unsparing kindness.