Elizabeth Jane Howard

Who is Elizabeth Jane Howard?

Elizabeth Jane Howard, CBE 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 with 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.

Her father was David Liddon Howard. She married Peter Scott in 1942; they had a daughter, Nicola, and were 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 her 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.