A woman of some importance | 22 September 2016

Searching for a 12-month stretch in the life of Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2013) that might illuminate the kind of person she was and the circumstances of her fraught and chaotic career, I settled on the year of 1955. Our heroine, then living in a maisonette flat in Little Venice and reading manuscripts for the publishing firm of Chatto & Windus, was hard at work on her well-received second novel, The Long View (1956). She was also having an affair with Arthur Koestler, who, when they entertained, her biographer tells us, expected her to ‘produce a three-course meal, look demurely beautiful and say as little as possible’.

And so the year winds on. Koestler dazzles her with his volcanic temperament, gets her pregnant and then fixes an abortion. Laurie Lee takes her to Spain, tells her that no one as beautiful as she is could ever be any good at writing and then returns to his wife.