
Elizabeth Jane Howard, pictured in the 1950s, looked at a changing England in her five novels about the Cazalet family.
When it comes to books, don’t we just love our categories. What do you like to read? Oh, I’m into chicklit, Scandi-noir, vampire fiction, Fifty Shades, misery memoirs, steampunk, chillers, thrillers, horror, erotica, fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal, cyberpunk, cosy mysteries, hardboiled crime, sagas, golden age crime, Victorian novels (or VicLit – you heard it here first).
Categories are undeniably helpful for publishers and booksellers, but sometimes rather less so for readers and writers. Elizabeth Jane Howard, the writer and novelist who died this month, did not receive quite the acclaim her work merited and this may be because of the perception that her books belong in the category labelled ‘women’s fiction’.
Howard’s best-known work, the five novels about the Cazalets, is an absorbing and elegantly written account of the fortunes of an upper middle-class family from the 1930s to the 1950s. We are drawn into the lives of a range of characters, male and female, some of whom we follow from childhood to the stage at which they have children of their own. Their emotional development and reactions to the huge scope of events they experience – birth, deaths of parents and children, marriage, love in many forms, war, education, sexual assault, financial difficulties, growing up, affairs, divorce, rivalries, careers, is sensitively and realistically portrayed.
Multi-viewpoint structure
The multi-viewpoint narrative structure is deftly handled and leads us to understand the inner lives of all the characters even when we dislike or disapprove of them.
Throughout the novels, the account of personal experiences is seamlessly blended with the social, cultural and economic changes that took place in England during the period they cover. The Cazalet family is headed by the paterfamilias and the matriarch, who are known as Brig and the Duchy (sounds rather like an indie band), and consists of their four children and nine grandchildren, plus wives, husbands and close friends.
Their way of life is familiar to most of us only through fictional and historical accounts. Their house in the country, Home Place, is staffed by a small army of servants and we get a modicum of insight into the lives and attitudes of the staff.
I love the few pages which give us, in free indirect speech which brings the character alive, the thoughts and history of Mrs Cripps the housekeeper. She was double-crossed and jilted by the groom at a former workplace, and now has an Understanding with a married man who we can see has no intention of divorcing his wife, and she had once rolled the pastry for the game pie at a shooting party in which the late king was present. She deserves a series of her own.
It’s hard to read these passages without hearing the voice of Mrs Bridges from Upstairs, Downstairs, a series for which Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote a few episodes.
The details of everyday life
Small details give us the texture of everyday life. We find out what people ate and how much things cost and that hot water was a rare luxury. Life was a series of tedious little hardships and the slog of getting through and keeping the home front going. No one had many clothes, so you hung on to what you had.
The novel ‘Confusion’ begins with Polly sorting out her late mother’s clothes, the stamped velvet jacket with marcasite buttons (ooh yes, please) and the winter coat with a squirrel collar (not so much), and most of them too worn and shapeless to be of any use.
Clothes help to define the character of Miss Milliment, the family governess (for the girls – the boys went to boarding and public school) whose life is a bleak illustration of the plight of many women of her type and era. Her unsavoury aura, with her smelly clothes, spattered with food stains, reminds us of the difficulties of keeping clean when you have to wash your garments in a dank little bathroom with – yes, very little hot water.
These characteristics can blind us to the merits of her gentle, diffident voice and her wise counsel. A clergyman’s daughter, with a fiancé who was killed in the Boer War, no means of support and no security, she has more in common with similar women in Austen and Bronte novels of the previous century than with her young pupils who will reach a hair’s-breadth of the 1960s.
The lost shops of London
The London way of life in bygone days is evoked through the names of shops, some familiar, such as Fortnum and Mason, and others such as Galeries Lafayette, which was in Regent Street until the mid-60s, barely a memory.
In Gayler and Pope, a small department store, your money and bill were put in a canister which was whizzed along a wire to the cashier, who returned it with your receipt and change. (A shop in Guildford had the same arrangement until the mid-1970s.) References to tea at Gunters and Fullers in the Strand add to the narrative’s authenticity.
The men who don’t fight in the war run timber firms and airbases and belong to gentlemen’s clubs some of them. We also have a portrait painter, a would-be painter and teacher, and a pacifist. We see different experiences of and attitudes to war, from Hugh who was injured in the First World War and dreads the next, to the young boys who think it a a wizard adventure, to Edward who finds it handy for his philandering pursuits.
How categories fail writers
In which category should we place this entertaining, thought-provoking, informative exploration of the lives of a well-to-do, pretty posh family during the years of WW2? Every choice would be a compromise.
Unless you can find a section with a label ‘literary, intelligent writing which both men and women will enjoy’. The fact that you will never see such a sign highlights the inadequacy of the label ‘women’s fiction’ and the disservice it does to many fine writers.