Louisa Young Continues Cazalet Chronicles

Louisa Young is writing three new novels to continue her aunt Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicles. The author, who is Howard's niece, received permission from Howard's daughter and is working with the original publishers.

Elizabeth Jane Howard, known as Jane, began the family saga in 1990 after her stepson Martin Amis advised her to pursue it over an updated Sense and Sensibility. The five-volume series, fictionalising Howard's life, became a global phenomenon selling millions of copies. The first book, The Light Years, opens in 1937, and the final volume ends in 1958.

A Family Story Within a Story

Young's personal connection to the material is profound. Her first book was a biography of her grandmother, sculptor Kathleen Scott, who was Howard's mother-in-law. Howard was a living witness for that project. In the Cazalet books, Kathleen Scott is fictionalised as the monstrous Zee, who threatens to kill the character based on Howard. Young's own mother had been secretary to Howard's first husband, Peter Scott, and lent Howard money to leave him.

Young read each Cazalet volume avidly as it was published, often wanting to ask her aunt what was real. Howard told her the fiction was "true in spirit." This layering of reality and invention creates what Young calls a "curious palimpsest," adding tension noted by readers of Howard's memoir Slipstream (2002) or Artemis Cooper's biography A Dangerous Innocence (2016).

The Decision to Continue the Saga

The idea to continue the series emerged almost as a joke in an email to Young's agent. She initially thought facing the devoted fans or navigating 500,000 words of continuity was daunting. The project gained serious traction when Howard's daughter gave her blessing, and Young found an encouraging message from Howard calling one of her novels "a triumph." The original publishers agreed, and they decided on a trilogy.

Young revisited the books, identifying loose threads. She felt the characters' lives were continuing just off-stage. The fifth book, All Change, ends at Christmas 1958; Young was born three months later. "The idea that their lives might be up to me and my imagination was intoxicating, trepidation-inducing and inspiring," she writes.

Carrying the Story Forward

Young aims to pick up specific unresolved plots. These include the incestuous romance between half-siblings Juliet and Neville, a better ending for Villy, and a future for Rachel, the character who realises she is a lesbian. The great unresolved issue is the fate of Louise's abandoned son, Sebastian, a topic too close to home for Howard to address.

Young will maintain Howard's structure of tessellated sections from different characters' points of view but will allow her own generational use of language to bring the story forward in time. She is now the age Howard was when writing the fictionalised account of her life. Young sees it not as pastiche but as a living story, a family chronicle rolling on through reality as it does on the page.