It’s the birthday of roughly a bazillion authors, poets, and playwrights, including A.E. Housman, Robert Frost, Joseph Campbell, Tennessee Williams, Erica Jong, and Elizabeth Jane Howard. (Sometimes there is just nobody, and sometimes they all clump up.) Hilary Mantel, author of the stunning novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, thinks very highly of Howard’s writing, and that’s good enough for me, so Howard it is.

Elizabeth Jane Howard was born in 1923 in London, England, and is best known for a series of novels called the Cazalet Chronicles, and also for a series of disastrous relationships, including her marriage to novelist Kingsley Amis. Howard grew up with upper-middle-class privileges but also a critical, cold mother and a father who started making advances at her when she was a teenager. She married Peter Scott, son of the famous polar explorer, at 19 and had her only child, Nicola, but left the marriage (and child) after just a few years to pursue writing.

Howard’s first novel, The Beautiful Visit (1950), won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was followed by a second, somewhat experimental novel, The Long View (1956), which details a marriage backwards through time, starting with its disintegration and moving to the inception of the relationship; it’s been suggested by at least one critic that this novel belongs in the canon of great novels of the 20th century. In the meantime Howard had an astonishing number of affairs (well, that’s relative: maybe I’m easily impressed), a brief second marriage in 1958, and a third marriage to Kingsley Amis in 1965. The marriage lasted 18 years but ended in bitterness.

By this time Howard had written several more novels, and in 1990 she published the first of the Cazalet Chronicles, called The Light Years, followed by Marking Time (1991), Confusion (1993), Casting Off (1995), and All Change (2013). The novels trace three generations of an English family and are semi-autobiographical; the first two were made into a BBC miniseries in 2001. Howard’s popularity has come to eclipse Kingsley Amis’s. (This feels a little like poetic justice, given that she had to put up with Mr. Grouchy Pants for years.)

Howard’s writing truly transcended her personal life; though she was a “bottomless pit of neediness” (her therapist’s words), she was somehow able to use her experiences to create fine, nuanced fiction, which she did to the end of her life. She died in Bungay, Suffolk, in 2014 at the age of 90, with a book in progress.

Have a fine Monday, the sort of Monday you always *wish* you could have, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.