Adams, Matthew (3–4 June 2017). "Talent and torment". The Sydney Morning Herald . Retrieved 4 September 2017.

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. The trouble with human relations is that the damned ball is always rolling, or in the air, never peacefully in charge of one person.

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. If it is impossible to be in two places at once, it ought to be impossible to make two people unhappy at the same time. 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] There are only two kinds of people—those who live different lives with the same partners, and those who live the same life with different partners.

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] This quotation is the very definition of the writing style in this book. Is this entire book a stream of consciousness from Mr. Fleming?You spend ninety per cent of your time with children, invalids, fools, and animals. What a mind will yours become.” He never deprecated his wife, even by implication. He simply added, as it were, another storey to the structure of his personality, and invited the lady in question to put herself temporarily in possession: there she might perch precariously, in what she could be easily persuaded was an isolated castle in a rich and strange air".

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 ] 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] The Beautiful Visit. Jonathan Cape. 1950. ISBN 978-0-224-60977-7. Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize You should be more discriminating in the flattery you require. Or if that is beyond you, more selective as to time".A volte le sembrava di odiarlo: a volte le sembrava di amarlo tanto da poter avvizzire e morire sotto la sferza silenziosa della sua indifferenza. Si aggrappava sempre a lui o a se stessa, non ce la faceva ad affrontare la somma dei rispettivi sentimenti. You sneer so much, like someone perpetually exhaling. You never absorb a breath of anybody.......". (That is a clever description of a condescending attitude but I simply don't believe that anyone - even these upper middle class characters in early to mid-20th century London - would speak to someone else like that. It's much too theatrical and precise and simply doesn't ring true. Perhaps I am mistaken?) Ho letto questo libro allo stesso modo in cui ho guardato La corrispondenza, il film di Giuseppe Tornatore. 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.

I will not spend my evenings with you in an atmosphere of Freudian night nursery. I will not play down to that adolescent's Italian comic opera. Give me gout and a little more money, and a few more doors to the kitchen and we should have been complete". Three Miles Up and Other Strange Stories. 2003. ISBN 978-1-872621-75-3. (Contains the three stories included in We Are for the Dark, plus "Mr Wrong".) Howard paints a portrait of life (and marriage) in mid-20th century London. Her depiction of the society in which the Flemings live and the incisive examination of their marriage can be amusing. As written by Howard, it seems to be a time when a man marries under the illusion that he can take the raw material that he perceives as his wife and shape her into something pleasing to him. Antonia’s willingness to accept this situation and her continual striving for Conrad’s love also seems to belong to another time. But the sadness of a world in which love seems impossible and marriage at best a waste of people’s lives and at worst the opportunity for people to destroy someone (or themselves), becomes increasingly painful. What a mistake it is to listen to one’s thoughts. But it is a mistake of such infinite variety that making it constitutes a chief pleasure in life. No woman would like being told what she was, or would have been. They like the future—the future and the present.”How odd, he thought, listening to her, a poet can see someone in the street, and thereafter intoxicate others with what he saw, but she or I can thoroughly love, or think we love, and immediately after it seems incommunicable, or dies from our poor expression. un libro molto femminile, e non è privo dei cliché su crisi di coppia e relazioni adultere. Però questo "lungo sguardo" mi è sembrato posarsi con intelligenza, e in certe parti l'ho seguito con la stessa tensione e lo stesso pathos che fa provare un thriller. 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]