Dangerously romantic

Catherine Larner talks to Aldeburgh Festival guest writer Artemis Cooper, biographer of novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, who lived her later years in Suffolk

WHENEVER authors, as guests at events and festivals, finish talking about their latest book with an invitation for questions from the audience, there is a certain trepidation. How long will they have to wait for that first hand to be raised? Or will there be a silent, if respectful, disinclination to pursue the matter any further?

For Artemis Cooper, however, every speaking engagement for her new biography of the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard achieves the same astonishing response.

“I’ve barely stopped speaking and five hands will shoot up,” she says. “People want to psychoanalyze her, to find out what happened and why. People are fascinated by her.”

Much is already known about this treasured novelist, of course. In addition to her own bestselling memoir, Slipstream, she has a significant body of work – 11 novels, two short story collections and, most famously, a family saga in four volumes, called The Cazalet Chronicle.

She drew on a colourful and troubled life. There was an unhappy childhood, a thwarted ambition to be an actress, three marriages, a daughter she felt unable to care for, a string of affairs with unsuitable (usually married) men, loneliness and, in her later years, falling foul of a conman.

Her books displayed insight and wisdom, but in life, Jane (as she was known) seemed extraordinarily inept. Her therapist told her “you are a bottomless pit of neediness,” and, in working on the book, Artemis says she, too, was keen to know why Jane made the same mistakes again and again.