In the late 1980s Elizabeth Jane Howard was wondering what to write next. Jane, as she was always known, was at that time the author of seven novels. Her debut, The Beautiful Visit, had won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1951 when she was 28 years old and The Long View (1956) was one of the first novels written with reverse chronology. Her talent was somewhat overshadowed in a tawdry world by her drop-dead beauty and by her having briefly been an actor (and by the famous lovers and husbands she walked out on, including Sir Peter Scott, the ornithologist and conservationist, in 1946, and Kingsley Amis, who was then himself a famous novelist, in 1983).
Stuck, she asked her stepson Martin Amis which of two projects she should go for: an updated version of Sense and Sensibility, or a family saga based on her own life? He said, do the family saga. Jane’s family project developed into the Cazalet Chronicles: five volumes in which she fictionalised her life’s 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.
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.
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’s mother-in-law: mother of Peter Scott and of my father Wayland Young. In 1990 I was writing a biography of Kathleen – so Jane was a living witness for me. It put my smoky-voiced, glamorous aunt and me in a 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.
That was my first book; the last Cazalet novel was to be Jane’s last. I was so ready to sit at her feet, listen to her stories, to “carry her reticule”, 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’d never met, from decades before my birth. Jane gave me one version; Monkey gave me another. She loved me, I think, at least initially, for my dad’s sake, and because I was a young woman, becoming a writer.
Through the mirrors and veils of her fiction, I recognised people and situations, saw hints of truth about my own family’s mysteries. In reality, Kathleen Scott and 19-year-old Jane had not got on at all – it was a hurried and frightened wartime marriage, a failure immediately. In the Cazalet books, Kathleen is fictionalised as Zee and comes across as an absolute monster, who threatened to kill Jane/Louise.
But my father adored his mother: “She was always saying she was going to kill people!” he said. “It was a turn of phrase … but the wrong one for Jane then.” 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’s always fascinating to think of your parents’ generation being young, and messy.
I read the volumes avidly as they came out, and ran back to her wanting to ask, “Jane, is that real? Was that true?” But these can be hard questions, and impertinent. Fiction is meant to be emotionally true, not factually. “True in spirit,” she told me. At the same time as she protected her own version, she wanted to protect those she loved. This curious palimpsest gives the fiction an astonishing extra tension, as those who have read her memoir, Slipstream (2002), or the biography by Artemis Cooper (A Dangerous Innocence, 2016) can testify.
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’t 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’t think they were, and they’re not: I’ve 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’t go where they wanted; they couldn’t 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.
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’s mantle. Until it did – which was as a PS in a “What Next?” email of my own to my agent. I was suggesting a long list of bad ideas, and then at the end: “Or I could always try to continue the Cazalet Chronicles”. 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?
I realised it wasn’t such a terrible idea when Jane’s daughter, my cousin, gave her blessing. I found a message from Jane telling me a novel of mine was “a triumph”. My agent was all for it. We went to Jane’s own publishers, and worked with some of her editors. There would be three volumes, we decided. One would just be silly – why wake everybody up for that? – and more than three was too far ahead to see.
I read the books again, thinking about how I would do it. Loose ends trailed before me, begging to be picked up. Pitfalls beckoned. The unsettling incestuous romance between half-siblings Juliet and Neville needed closure. Villy, Louise’s mother, was a victim of being a 20th-century woman as well as being a bad 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’t 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). And then there is the great unresolved issue of Louise’s abandoned son, Sebastian, who was too close to home in reality for Jane to address in fiction. And look, there’s my fictionalised grandparents, Zee and The Judge; there’s fictionalised Dad, here called Hugo, disguised as a cousin for propriety’s 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.)
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 their lives might be up to me and my imagination was intoxicating, trepidation-inducing and inspiring. It’s not about inventing things to happen to them: they are already in full flow. I am chasing after them with a notebook. I make it seamless for the reader by continuing Jane’s elegant structure of tessellated sections, each from one person’s point of view, but I do allow the way I write, my generation’s use of language, to bring things forward in time, as time itself moves forward.
I’m now the age Jane was when she was writing this fictionalised account of her life. Can these three novels count as mine, when I’ve broken into her world to write them? I’m not sure that’s answerable. But equally, what a circle it is, from writing about the young girl Jane in my biography of my grandmother, to the picking up of her baton now, after her death, beyond her knowledge. By bringing these characters on, of necessity I make them mine. Because this isn’t a pastiche, an imitation, or a homage. It’s a living story. The family chronicle rolls on through time in reality as it does on the page. I might even put it in a book …
• The Golden Hours, the sixth volume of the Cazalet Chronicles, is out on 3 September. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Move on Up, the seventh, will be published in September 2027.
