Elizabeth Jane Howard

'I have always rather wondered whether perhaps you and Clary might not benefit from university?  It is the time when one can absorb most and I should like to think of you being exposed to really good minds, first-class teaching and the opportunity to meet many different kinds of people.' Miss Milliment, Marking Time, Elizabeth Jane Howard

I’m racing through Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet novels quite unable to put them down. I’ve almost finished the third volume Confusion and I’m so invested in the characters now that I can’t wait to find out whether Polly will find love, Villy will kick her cheating husband into touch, Louise will resume her passion for acting and Clary’s father will ever return from capture in France.

Home Place, the Sussex country house with its familiar and comforting routines provides sanctuary for various generations of the Cazalet family amidst the hardships of wartime. Tennis tournaments are played while bombers fly overhead, lemons and sugar are nowhere to be found, clothing coupons are used on rare shopping trips to Liberty and Peter Jones in London and passengers arriving on the Sussex trains have to count the stops and guess which station they are at because of the blackouts.
 

And what will become of the wonderful Miss Milliment? The elderly governess of great intellect and gift for teaching. Despite her unfortunate appearance and lonely life lived in abject poverty she always advocates education for girls.

Elizabeth Jane Howard has a remarkable ability to portray three or four generations of the Cazalet family and their domestic staff and wider networks of friends and make them all seem vivid and real. There are lots of affairs and extra-marital relations perhaps as a reaction to the constant fear of bombs and the advance of Hitler.  

Good to see that the first volume The Light Years is now a Picador classic and good to know that I still have two more books this series to come. Do you love The Cazalets?

Taylor and Howard

The hydrangea by the front door faded through innumerable shades of blue.

There are some similarities between Elizabeth Taylor's A Game of Hide and Seek and Elizabeth Jane Howard's Love All. Both feature upper middle-class families who live in a kind of genteel poverty, both have characters who are fond of reading Jane Austen and both examine the hopelessness of unrequited love.

In A Game of Hide and Seek, Harriet falls in love with Vesey one summer when she is just eighteen. She continues to love him when she goes to work in a department store, meets the wealthy but dull Charles, marries him and has a daughter. Flippant and overconfident, Vesey is seemingly uninterested in Harriet and his life spirals downward. He is expelled from Oxford and becomes a poverty stricken actor. He and Harriet meet again in middle age and try to re-ignite their relationship. I was less interested in the strange relationship between Vesey and Harriet than the minor characters in this novel - Harriet's wonderful mother who went to prison for women's rights and Julia, the mother of Charles, a former actress who retains her theatrical affectations well into old age.

The focus in Love All switches between different characters, but my favourites were Persephone Plover - known as Percy - who is abandoned by her parents and bought up by her Aunt Floy and her beloved black cat, Marvell. When Aunt Floy, who designs gardens, is commissioned to restore the gardens of a country house Persephone goes with her and takes on the organisation of an arts festival in the village. There she receives two proposals of marriage and accepts neither! At 450 pages this novel briefly flagged a little for me about half-way through and then I got interested again and read straight through to the end.

Elizabeth Jane Howard

Ah, lovely September sunshine. I decided to give Elizabeth Jane Howard a whirl as I've had some positive comments about her novels on my blog. Rather than commit to the four volume Cazalet series I thought I'd start with Love All. How can you not love a novel with a central character called Persephone Plover?! Her writing reminds me a little of Jilly Cooper - a large cast of upper-class characters and a pervading Englishness. I'll let you know how I get on.

Talking of Jilly Cooper, has anyone ever read her 'girl' series - Harriet, Emily, Octavia, Bella and Imogen? My sister and I loved them when we were younger.