There are only two kinds of people—those who live different lives with the same partners, and those who live the same life with different partners. In the night she woke, and all the time of her life seemed concentrated on the moment of waking, and all the meaning of her existence on her being deeply, irrevocably, in love. I will not spend my evenings with you in an atmosphere of Freudian night nursery. I will not play down to that adolescent's Italian comic opera. Give me gout and a little more money, and a few more doors to the kitchen and we should have been complete".

Originally published in 1956, The Long View is Elizabeth Jane Howard's uncannily authentic portrait of one marriage and one woman. Observant and heartbreaking, written with exhilarating wit, it is a gut-wrenching account of the birth and death of a relationship - as extraordinary as it is timeless.I’m going to attach my quotes at the end of this note, They are described by Hilary Mantel as “jaundiced observations – pithily expressed, painfully accurate.” I read the book because Mantel selected Howard as her favourite novelist, and I’ve attached below a long quote from her article and a link to it. I’d never read any Howard before, although I knew her as Kingsley Amis’s wife and Martin Amis’s stepmother. This is shameful but a reflection of how the world regards “women writers.” She is a better writer than either and certainly a better observer of human relationships.

The Long View by Elizabeth Jane Howard is a brilliantly written but ultimately depressing story of a marriage. When we meet the Flemings they are ”celebrating” the engagement of their son who is entering a marriage that looks like it will replicate the disaster that is his parents’. After reading this story of Conrad, an interesting but selfish, difficult, and unlikable man, and his wife, Antonia, who searches for his approval over what feels like a lifetime, anyone might pause before getting married. Do you know why it’s easy to make decisions for other people? It is not simply because one is objective. It is because if I make a decision for you, I shall not have to carry it out. If I make a wrong decision, the responsibility will still be yours. Howard, who died at 90 in 2014, became far from innocent, marrying three times and having a string of lovers, including her first husband’s brother, Arthur Koestler, Ken Tynan, Laurie Lee, Cyril Connolly, and Cecil Day-Lewis. Perhaps all those lovers were the result of a sort of innocence.a b Brown, Andrew (9 November 2002). "Profile: Elizabeth Jane Howard". The Guardian . Retrieved 17 February 2018. a b c Beauman, Nicola (3 January 2014). "Elizabeth Jane Howard: Writer". The Independent . Retrieved 17 February 2018.

The most mysterious, intricate point about women is that they require somebody else to teach them to live in their own body. Without that, they are lost, because they never discovered. Finding a character's point of view is made more difficult because the author keeps inserting her own external view, as when a character is reminded that she should 'take tea (that horrible unnecessary meal designed to make unsatisfied women more unsatisfactory) with' another woman.The point about two people is that they should change at approximately the same speed in approximately the same direction. If you think that you might read this book and don’t want to know anything about the plot, then read no further. Although the pleasure of the book is in the prose and acute observations of human relationships, so I don’t think that knowing a little about the book would matter much; and I’ve no idea anyway how much I will give away. Nearly impossible for me to give Elizabeth Jane Howard anything less than 5 stars because 5 stars means I will re-read and I always want to re-read her.

Elizabeth Jane Howard is undoubtedly an intelligent and talented writer. I recently read and enjoyed one of her other novels, 'After Julius'. I like 'The Long View' too. There is much to admire in it. It's a sensitive and insightful account of the breakdown of a marriage. But I don't think it's the classic that professional critics and other novelists, such as Hilary Mantel (who contributes an introduction to the Picador Classics edition that I have just read), seem to think it is. For me, it has one major failing: the author is sometimes unable to convert her clearly highly developed emotional intelligence into authentic, realistic dialogue. There are many occasions when characters - often the principal protagonists, Conrad and Antonia Fleming, but others too - simply think or speak in a way which seems forced and contrived. That is true of 'After Julius' too. But it was less pronounced there, to the extent that I did not feel that it overwhelmed the story. In 'The Long View', however, it's a distinct problem and marred my enjoyment of the book to a considerable extent. Here are some examples from Part Two of the novel. What a mistake it is to listen to one’s thoughts. But it is a mistake of such infinite variety that making it constitutes a chief pleasure in life.They [mother and daughter] seemed two women bound together, having in common nothing in particular, and everything in general; who, were they not related, would not willingly have spent five minutes in each other’s company; but who, because of their relationship, had spent nineteen years, irritating, modifying, interfering with, decryring, and depending upon each other.