On a winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation.

It was an extraordinary news story.

The story of an aristocrat, Lord Lucan, who's said to have killed the family Nanny,

mistaking her for his wife, then somehow just disappeared.

One of the great mysteries in English criminal history. We're still looking for Lucan.

It's honestly one of the most powerful stories of my lifetime.

I'm Alex von Tundselman.

This is The Lucan Obsession.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

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Today we're talking about Elizabeth Jane Howard, the British novelist who was born 100 years ago this year in 1923.

One of my favourite writers, she has never to my mind received the critical acclaim she is owed.

While Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were publishing their greatest modernist works,

Howard was being raised in a privileged but unhappy family, early experiences which would inform her

writing through her long career. Despite winning the John Llewellyn-Rise Prize for her first novel,

The Beautiful Visit in 1950, it wasn't until the second half of her life

that her fictional quintet, the Casillac Chronicles, would bring unignorable commercial acclaim.

Even now, her private life, marriage to Kingsley Amos, affairs with Laurie Lee and Cecil

Day Lewis, often unfairly overshadows her books. Well, today we hope

to redress the balance and joining me is her biographer Artemis Cooper, author of Elizabeth Jane

Howard, A Dangerous Innocence, her editor and friend Maria Rait, and author of the Familiers

and Mrs England, Stacey Halls.

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