Elizabeth Jane Howard Cazalet Chronicles 5 Books Set, (The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, Casting Off and All Change)

Product Information

This series is one of my favourite comfort reads, and has the added benefit of being set before and during the Second World War (this means that I can pretend I’m re-reading it for ‘research purposes’). Elizabeth Jane Howard - obituary". The Telegraph. 2 January 2014. ISSN 0307-1235 . Retrieved 17 February 2018. Howard, Elizabeth Jane (2003). Three Miles Up and Other Strange Stories. ISBN 978-1-872621-75-3. (contains the three stories included in We Are for the Dark, plus "Mr Wrong")

Elizabeth Jane Howard Cazalet Chronicles 5 Books Set, (The

Other certainties are also fracturing. Edward's divorce and remarriage to the ghastly snob Diana, whose dresses are too small and makeup too liberally applied, has had its effects on his children: Louise, having walked out on her first husband and their son, is a wealthy man's mistress, and her brother Teddy flits between debs and barmaids. Hugh's daughter Polly, now Lady Fakenham and one of the series' most reliable favourites, is trying to get a wedding reception business going in her husband's dilapidated ancestral home, and is running into problems because the clients won't put up with one loo and salad cream instead of mayonnaise. Nannies and governesses are succumbing to senility. In protest at the whole crumbling edifice, one far‑flung relative has gone off to become a monk. Elsewhere, bohemianism laps at the family's respectability: Clary, once an awkward child who has become a literary type married to a much older man, writes a play candidly dissecting her marital trials and tribulations; her younger brother, a raffish photographer, falls in incestuous love. It's a far cry from nursery teas. Elizabeth Jane Howard's much-loved Cazalet Chronicles books comprise an elegantly written Sussex family saga, taking the reader from the emotional impact of the Great War via heartaches, intrigue and air raids to the death of their beloved matriarch. As their way of life, dependent on servants and traditions, shifts into the modern world, the Cazalets too must change. It will break your heart several times over, but it’s also full of joy. The Cazalet children in particular are a real treat: I’m rarely, if ever, a fan of child protagonists, but Elizabeth Jane Howard is expert at creating believable – and likeable – children with inner lives as complex as any of the adults.

At the beginning of The Light Years, the Cazalets congregate for a summer holiday at Home Place, the family pile in Sussex. The story is structured around the four adult children of "the Brig" and "the Duchy"': their three sons Hugh, Edward and Rupert, each of them with wives and children in tow, and their unmarried daughter Rachel, who is conducting a discreet relationship with "Sid", speedily revealed to be a woman. In among the personal dramas – a dangerous birth, a spoilt younger wife, unhappy step-children, covert lesbianism – the largely silent Brig busily buys a spare farmhouse and sets about converting it for his family's use, adding wings and bathrooms and whatnot, all on the rolling proceeds of the family timber firm. But 20 years later, the firm is foundering, its revenues falling and its property portfolio rapidly becoming a liability rather than an asset. All three sons – uxorious Hugh, faithless Edward, indecisive Rupert – are now in charge, but they don't have their late father's head for business; and, even more fatally, they aren't equipped for or don't want to recognise the disaster about to befall them. It is as though the possibility of failure – and of the profound effect that it will have on their material circumstances and social standing – has simply not occurred to them; they are insulated until the moment an impertinent bank manager, certainly of a class below theirs, informs them to the contrary. A hefty multi-volume chronicle that I can personally and sincerely recommend as a great idea for the coming weeks, though, is Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles. Beginning with The Light Years, the five volume series follows the lives of the Cazalet family, their friends and neighbours, and their servants, starting in 1937 as the storm clouds of war begin to gather, and proceeding through two decades of births, deaths, marriages, affairs, abortions, divorces and any other major or minor life event you care to name. Every Saturday he takes his family out to town, where he waits on the corner with the other town ’s men like his fathers and grandfathers did. It revolves around the flight of the princess to escape the awful marriage to his father (Perrault, 1977).

BBC Radio 4 Extra - Elizabeth Jane Howard - The Cazalets BBC Radio 4 Extra - Elizabeth Jane Howard - The Cazalets

The Chronicles were a family saga "about the ways in which English life changed during the war years, particularly for women." They follow three generations of a middle-class English family and draw strongly from Howard's own life and memories. [7] The first four volumes, The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion, and Casting Off, were published from 1990 to 1995. Howard wrote the fifth, All Change (2013), in one year; it was her final novel. Millions of copies of the Cazalet Chronicles were sold worldwide. [1] Mostly, I want to remember how desperately I wanted the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, or maybe Tinkerbell to wave a magic wand and have a white knight rescue the family and make the heartache go away... I kept thinking perhaps Louise's wealthy lover step in and save the family home. Confusion: As the world reels in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the Cazalets are dealt a tragic blow, and a new generation struggles to find peace with each other, a peace that seems to prove as elusive as it is in the larger world.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] Finally, both works of fiction have elements of outrage and the search for a mixed child for different reasons. She is also excellent at describing children's thoughts, feelings, opinions and conversations. She is one of those rare adults who did not forget what it felt like to be a child or teenager. She was probably close to her stepson Martin Amis. She also describes maternal love convincingly. In fact, on reading her biography online I realise how biographical these books are and the characters and incidents are derived from her own life.