{"id":600637,"date":"2026-08-30T13:30:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T13:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/600637\/"},"modified":"2026-08-30T13:30:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-30T13:30:14","slug":"who-would-dare-take-on-elizabeth-jane-howards-fans-louisa-young-on-reviving-the-cazalet-chronicles-elizabeth-jane-howard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/600637\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Who would dare take on Elizabeth Jane Howard\u2019s fans?\u2019 Louisa Young on reviving the Cazalet Chronicles | Elizabeth Jane Howard"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the late 1980s Elizabeth Jane\u00a0Howard was wondering what to write next. Jane, as\u00a0she\u00a0was always known, was\u00a0at that time the author of\u00a0seven novels. Her debut, The Beautiful Visit, had won the John\u00a0Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1951 when she was 28 years old and The\u00a0Long View (1956) was one of the first novels written with reverse chronology. Her talent was somewhat overshadowed in a tawdry world by\u00a0her drop-dead beauty and by her\u00a0having briefly been an actor (and\u00a0by\u00a0the famous lovers and husbands she walked out on, including Sir Peter Scott, the ornithologist and conservationist, in 1946, and Kingsley Amis<\/a>, who was then himself a famous novelist, in 1983).<\/p>\n

Stuck, she asked her stepson Martin\u00a0Amis which of two projects she\u00a0should go for: an updated version of Sense and Sensibility, or a family saga based on her own life? He said, do\u00a0the family saga. Jane\u2019s family project developed into the Cazalet Chronicles: five volumes in which she fictionalised her life\u2019s experience, divided between three young female cousins, Polly, Clary and Louise, and a cast of 52 more named characters, set between London and a grandparental family home in Sussex.<\/p>\n

The first volume, The Light Years (1990), opens in 1937, and the series closes in 1958. From a slow beginning, the Cazalets grew into a worldwide phenomenon, selling millions of copies, and has been in print ever since.<\/p>\n

As each one came out I tore through them: not just because Jane was brilliant and I was a fan, but also because she was my aunt. My grandmother, the sculptor Kathleen Scott, had been Jane\u2019s mother-in-law: mother of Peter Scott and of my father Wayland Young. In 1990 I was writing a\u00a0biography of Kathleen \u2013 so Jane was a\u00a0living witness for me. It put my smoky-voiced, glamorous aunt and me in\u00a0a peculiar overlap: she, in her 60s, was writing a fictional version of the actual life she had lived, and I, at 29, was writing a putatively factual version of the same things, though they had happened before I was born.<\/p>\n

double quotation markThrough the mirrors of her\u00a0fiction, I recognised people and situations, saw hints of truth about my\u00a0own family\u2019s mysteries<\/p>\n

That was my first book; the last Cazalet novel was to be Jane\u2019s last. I\u00a0was so ready to sit at her feet, listen to\u00a0her stories, to \u201ccarry her reticule\u201d, as she put it, when she went to literary festivals. In her beautiful house in Bungay, Suffolk, where she lived with her brother Colin, known as Monkey, we talked about everything. How funny life is, how circular! We gossiped about people I\u2019d never met, from decades before my birth. Jane gave me one version; Monkey gave me\u00a0another. She loved me, I think, at\u00a0least initially, for my dad\u2019s sake, and\u00a0because I was a young woman, becoming a writer.<\/p>\n

Through the mirrors and veils of her\u00a0fiction, I recognised people and situations, saw hints of truth about my\u00a0own family\u2019s mysteries. In reality, Kathleen Scott and 19-year-old Jane had not got on at all \u2013 it was a hurried and frightened wartime marriage, a\u00a0failure immediately. In the Cazalet books, Kathleen is fictionalised as\u00a0Zee\u00a0and comes across as an absolute\u00a0monster, who threatened to\u00a0kill Jane\/Louise.<\/p>\n

Paul Rhys, Lesley Manville, Anastasia Hille and Hugh Bonneville in the 2001 BBC TV series The Cazalets. Photograph: John Rogers\/BBC<\/p>\n

But my father adored his mother: \u201cShe was always saying she was going to kill people!\u201d he said. \u201cIt was a turn of phrase \u2026 but the wrong one for Jane then.\u201d My own mother had been secretary to Peter (fictionalised as Michael Hadleigh), and had lent the penniless Jane money to leave him. Both the real people and the characters in the books, only in their twenties, overlapped during and after the war in west London, where I lived. The past seemed so close, and so far away. And of course it\u2019s always fascinating to think of your parents\u2019 generation being young, and messy.<\/p>\n

I read the volumes avidly as they came out, and ran back to her wanting to ask, \u201cJane, is that real? Was that true?\u201d But these can be hard questions, and impertinent. Fiction<\/a> is meant to be emotionally true, not factually. \u201cTrue in spirit,\u201d she told me. At\u00a0the same time as she protected her\u00a0own version, she wanted to protect\u00a0those she loved. This curious palimpsest gives the fiction an astonishing extra tension, as those\u00a0who have read her memoir, Slipstream (2002), or the biography by\u00a0Artemis Cooper (A Dangerous Innocence, 2016) can testify.<\/p>\n

The Cazalet Chronicles are often described as a comfort read, both because they contain servants and food and clothes, and because they provide such a deeply complete fictional world for escaping into from an unsatisfactory real one. But being upper-middle-class doesn\u2019t protect the characters from rape, child abuse, incest, abandonment, suicide, divorce, concentration camps, war, fear, loss, cancer or death. They are sometimes seen as somehow lighter than her earlier, more literary works, but she didn\u2019t think they were, and they\u2019re not: I\u2019ve read them many times now and each time they get darker. Their surge of popularity during Covid makes perfect sense to me: the characters, like the rest of us during the lockdowns, were restricted by events beyond their control. They couldn\u2019t go where they wanted; they couldn\u2019t be with who they wanted to be with, they were constrained and scared and bored. And, in the main, they survived. Which is always reassuring.<\/p>\n

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double quotation markCan these three novels count as mine, when I\u2019ve broken into her world to write them?<\/p>\n

When something works, we want more of it. I always wanted more Cazalets. Chronicles should go on. But it never crossed my mind to imagine I could pick up Jane\u2019s mantle. Until it did \u2013 which was as a PS in a \u201cWhat Next?\u201d email of my own to my agent. I was suggesting a long list of bad ideas, and\u00a0then at the end: \u201cOr I could always\u00a0try to continue the Cazalet Chronicles\u201d. It was a joke! Jane was a great writer. Who would dare face the ranks of devotees, still so dedicated and protective? Or launch into the continuity perils of 500,000 words?<\/p>\n

I realised it wasn\u2019t such a terrible idea when Jane\u2019s daughter, my cousin,\u00a0gave her blessing. I found a message from Jane telling me a novel of mine was \u201ca triumph\u201d. My agent was all for it. We went to Jane\u2019s own publishers, and worked with some of\u00a0her editors. There would be three volumes, we decided. One would just\u00a0be silly \u2013 why wake everybody up\u00a0for that? \u2013 and more than three was\u00a0too far\u00a0ahead to see.<\/p>\n

I read the books again, thinking about how I would do it. Loose ends trailed before me, begging to be picked\u00a0up. Pitfalls beckoned. The unsettling incestuous romance between half-siblings Juliet and Neville needed closure. Villy, Louise\u2019s mother, was a victim of being a 20th-century woman as well as being a\u00a0bad mother. Mainly because she had to have all her teeth out, I wanted her to have a better ending than just being dumped and her four children disliking her. Virtuous, kind Rachel, who for years didn\u2019t even realise she was a lesbian, deserved better too (I am regularly accosted by young gay women wanting to know what I have planned for her, because it had better be good).\u00a0And then there is the great unresolved issue of Louise\u2019s abandoned son, Sebastian, who was\u00a0too close to home in reality for\u00a0Jane to address in fiction. And look, there\u2019s my fictionalised grandparents, Zee and The Judge; there\u2019s fictionalised Dad, here called Hugo, disguised as a cousin for propriety\u2019s sake. It was these novels that told me how much Jane had loved Dad. Alas, she had him die in the War, and this is not the kind of saga where he can come back to life played by a different actor. (In reality he had six children and a sixty-year marriage, and lived till 2009.)<\/p>\n

It did seem to me that the characters were all still there, their lives continuing, just off-stage. The fifth Cazalet book, All Change, ends at Christmas 1958. I was born three months later. I was there! The idea that\u00a0their lives might be up to me and my imagination was intoxicating, trepidation-inducing and inspiring. It\u2019s not about inventing things to happen to them: they are already in full flow. I am chasing after them with a notebook. I\u00a0make it seamless for the reader by continuing Jane\u2019s elegant structure of tessellated sections, each\u00a0from one person\u2019s point of view, but I do allow the way I write, my generation\u2019s use of language, to bring\u00a0things forward in time, as time\u00a0itself moves forward.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m now the age Jane was when she was writing this fictionalised account of her life. Can these three novels count as mine, when I\u2019ve broken into her world to write them? I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s answerable. But equally, what a\u00a0circle it is, from writing about the young girl Jane in my biography of my\u00a0grandmother, to the picking up of\u00a0her baton now, after her death, beyond her knowledge. By bringing these characters on, of necessity I\u00a0make them mine. Because this isn\u2019t\u00a0a\u00a0pastiche, an imitation, or a homage. It\u2019s a living story. The family chronicle\u00a0rolls on through time in\u00a0reality as it does on the page. I\u00a0might\u00a0even put it in\u00a0a book \u2026<\/p>\n

The Golden Hours, the sixth volume of\u00a0the Cazalet Chronicles, is out on 3\u00a0September. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply. Move on Up, the seventh, will be published in September 2027.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the late 1980s Elizabeth Jane\u00a0Howard was wondering what to write next. Jane, as\u00a0she\u00a0was always known, was\u00a0at that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600638,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-600637","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600637","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600637"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600637\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600637"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600637"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600637"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}