Elizabeth Jane Howard is a highly acclaimed English novelist, best known for her Cazalet Chronicles family saga. Set in England during the war, the series is a quartet that explores the lives of the Cazalet family, and it was later adapted to a BBC series called The Cazalets. Howard's writing is heavily influenced by Jane Austen, and her work is widely regarded as some of the most popular and enduring fiction from England.
Before becoming a novelist, Howard worked as an actor and a model. She was born in London, England, in 1923, and at the age of 19, she married her first husband, Peter Scott, with whom she had a daughter named Nicola. However, the marriage did not last, and Howard left Scott in the early 1950s. During this time, she began working as a part-time secretary for the Inland Waterways Association, where she met Robert Aickman. The two collaborated on a short story collection titled We Are for the Dark, and Howard later wrote about her brief affair with Aickman in her autobiography, Slipstream.
Howard's personal life was marked by several marriages and relationships. Her second marriage, to Jim Douglas Henry, was short-lived, but her third marriage, to novelist Kingsley Amis, lasted from 1965 to 1983. During this time, Howard wrote one of her most successful novels, Something in Disguise, while living at Lemmons, a Georgian house in Barnet. She has been credited with encouraging and enabling her stepson, Martin Amis, to become a more serious writer and reader. In the later years of her life, Howard lived in Bungay Suffolk, England, where she continued to write and publish her work. She was appointed CBE in the year 2000.