The Long View

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Then we return still further, to the 1930s. People still dress for dinner and don't understand one another. Alcohol still lubricates society. A woman stares into her empty glass as she decides that she could never be an artist, the glass symbolising an empty dream. She is told 'anyway, you'll marry and have children' although there were some actual careers open to women at this time. The last part of the story occurs in 1926. She was always expecting something wonderful to happen to her—up to the very day that she died, she believed that. At the end of the book Toni meets Conrad, and we understand why she marries him—and we know what is to happen.

A biography, entitled Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence by Artemis Cooper, was published by John Murray in 2017. A reviewer said it was "strongest in the case it makes for the virtues of Howard's fiction". [10] Personal life [ edit ] Howard, who died at 90 in 2014, became far from innocent, marrying three times and having a string of lovers, including her first husband’s brother, Arthur Koestler, Ken Tynan, Laurie Lee, Cyril Connolly, and Cecil Day-Lewis. Perhaps all those lovers were the result of a sort of innocence. Forty-three-year-old Antonia Fleming is preparing a dinner party for eight at the house in Campden Hill Square she shares with her husband, Conrad. The occasion is the engagement of their son, Julian. Their other child, Deirdre, hates her father and resents her mother—a reality Conrad ponders, along with the disastrous state of Deirdre’s single life, as he leaves the bed of his current mistress. Cooper, Jonathan (23 April 1990). "Novelist Martin Amis Carries on a Family Tradition: Scathing Wit and Supreme Self-Confidence". People . Retrieved 15 June 2012. Living, he always maintained, consisted of no fundamentals, outlines, basic truths, or principles, even for one person, let alone society, but simply a vast quantity of detail, endlessly variable and utterly unrelated.

This quotation is the very definition of the writing style in this book. Is this entire book a stream of consciousness from Mr. Fleming? The most mysterious, intricate point about women is that they require somebody else to teach them to live in their own body. Without that, they are lost, because they never discovered. The Beautiful Visit. Jonathan Cape. 1950. ISBN 978-0-224-60977-7. Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize

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.” Hilary Mantel on EJH Cooper, Artemis ‘’Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence’’, London: John Murray (2016), p.260.She was a nice, ignorant, unimaginative girl, designed perfectly to reproduce herself; and regarding her, Mr Fleming, found it difficult to believe in The Origin of the Species Anthony Thwaite (9 November 2002). "When will Miss Howard take off all her clothes?". The Guardian . Retrieved 1 November 2010. Made it about halfway thru this confusing rambling story. It could be called The Long Read or The Long Reference List.

If you think that you might read this book and don’t want to know anything about the plot, then read no further. Although the pleasure of the book is in the prose and acute observations of human relationships, so I don’t think that knowing a little about the book would matter much; and I’ve no idea anyway how much I will give away. 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] She passionately wanted to be regarded ‘for herself’ as women say, which means for some elusive attraction which they do not feel they possess.That said, there is much to applaud in this perceptive, sophisticated, sensitive but ultimately bleak work. Howard's astute turn of phrase works well in descriptive passages, such as this one: Adams, Matthew (3–4 June 2017). "Talent and torment". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 4 September 2017. Elizabeth Jane Howard CBE FRSL (26 March 1923 – 2 January 2014), was an English novelist. She wrote 12 novels including the best-selling series The Cazalet Chronicles. [1] Early life [ edit ] Do you know why it’s easy to make decisions for other people? It is not simply because one is objective. It is because if I make a decision for you, I shall not have to carry it out. If I make a wrong decision, the responsibility will still be yours.

The Light Years and Marking Time were serialised by Cinema Verity for BBC Television as The Cazalets in 2001. A BBC Radio 4 version in 45 episodes was also broadcast from 2012. [7] 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] Howard published five additional novels before she embarked on her best known work, the five-volume Cazalet Chronicles. As Artemis Cooper describes it: “Jane had two ideas, and could not decide which to embark on; so she invited her stepson Martin [Amis] round for a drink to ask his advice. One idea was an updated version of Sense and Sensibility … the other was a three-volume family saga … Martin said immediately, “Do that one.” [6] There were only two kinds of people, those who live different lives with the same partner, and those who live the same life with different partners … ”June Stoker would soon be introduced to a company which had long ceased to discover anything new about themselves likely to increase either their animation or their intimacy. Originally published in 1956, The Long View is Elizabeth Jane Howard's uncannily authentic portrait of one marriage and one woman. Observant and heartbreaking, written with exhilarating wit, it is a gut-wrenching account of the birth and death of a relationship - as extraordinary as it is timeless. The book has an autobiographical feel. Toni begins as a complete innocent about male female relationships, as is, 30 years later, the woman that Mrs Fleming’s son is to marry. Her daughter is less innocent in that she has become pregnant, but it’s surely innocence as well as foolishness that leads her to go off with the old, loving boyfriend. Perhaps all women (and all men?) begin in state of innocence still, but I think that the position of women has changed radically—it is perhaps the biggest change of the last century. The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard is a brilliantly written but ultimately depressing story of a marriage. When we meet the Flemings they are ”celebrating” the engagement of their son who is entering a marriage that looks like it will replicate the disaster that is his parents’. After reading this story of Conrad, an interesting but selfish, difficult, and unlikable man, and his wife, Antonia, who searches for his approval over what feels like a lifetime, anyone might pause before getting married.