Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1995,

and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a novelist. Her first book, The Beautiful Visit, was published in

1950 and it won the John Lewellan Reese Memorial Prize. Her latest work is The

Kaslet Chronicles, four novels about the life of a family in the 30s and 40s.

The 45 years in between have been filled by many other books and three marriages.

Peter Scott was her first husband and Kingsley Amos her last.

She left them because writing is not the only passion in her life.

She yearns for love.

The trouble is, she says, falling in love uses the same kind of energy you need for writing,

so you can't do both at the same time. She is Elizabeth Jane Howard.

So the fact, Jane, that you've produced four volumes of these Kazlet Chronicles over the past

five years means that you haven't been distracted by the demands of love.

I'm afraid not, no, the nearest I've come to it is my cavalier spaniel which is rather less

demanding. But I don't understand why you can't do both I mean surely why do you have to

compartmentalise? Well I suppose if one was awfully good at both those things one would be able to do both. I mean people like

Georg Saint seem to manage it nicely but I think perhaps I'm not very good at either of these things and so I have to use absolutely all the energy I've got for either of them.

Or is it the case that you can only be intimate with one person or one thing so it's the husband or the writing. I think really also it's I come

from a generation you know where women are expected to put their hobbies

practices, professions, vacations second to the man in their life.

And that dies very hard.

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