Ariane Bankes
Tales of the Heart
Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence
By Artemis Cooper
John Murray 376pp £25 order from our bookshop
Beware of beauty. The cover portrait of Elizabeth Jane Howard transfixes you, but beauty failed to bring her happiness – quite the opposite, in fact. It plays a starring role in Artemis Cooper’s perceptive biography and led Jane (as everyone called her) into a breathtaking number of doomed affairs and three marriages which ended in tears. Men, it appears, were powerless to resist her and she was uncertain enough of her own worth to resist them, more’s the pity.
While Cooper’s last book recounted the swashbuckling, almost picaresque life of Patrick Leigh Fermor, connoisseur of unfamiliar countries and cultures, this biography’s terrain is the landscape of the heart. And here lies the question: how is it that someone who could write with such a sure touch about passion, marriages
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'A publicist interviewed by Fairrie praises Collins and her heroines ... because these were "women who behaved like men". Is that supposed to be good, given how men behaved towards Collins?'
Peter Conrad reviews a new documentary about Jackie Collins.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/easy-writer
'Walk down your supermarket pet food aisle and you’ll be hard pressed to find a single brand that claims to be made with high-welfare meat. More expensive pet food should not be about spoiling our cats but about sparing the farmed beasts we feed them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/meattoo
'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine