The Beautiful Visit

I read the five books of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet chronicles and finished them over a decade ago and when I finished them I definitely intended to read more of her other books. The Cazalets were based on her own family and the experience of growing up in the changing world that succeeded the Second World War. I think I tried to read another of her books at some point but gave up quickly as I missed the Cazalets too much. Enough time has passed and I recently saw a review of this book and was inspired to give it a read.

This was Howard’s first novel and I felt you could see the foreshadowing of the Cazelets in it. The central character is an unnamed narrator, at the start of the novel she is sixteen and the First World War is about to start, taking her brothers to war and plunging her and her sister into various wartime troubles. Before the war begins though she is sent on an extended visit to the country home of another family over Christmas. After initial misgivings she has a fabulous time and meets a whole cast of personalities. The narrator never being named keeps her in the background of her own story as she struggles to develop a personality of her own.

I enjoyed the book very much, probably more than it deserved to be enjoyed. I had a strange kind of nostalgia for a world I never knew, and wouldn’t have enjoyed if I did, the narrator’s struggles felt both very small and very large at the same time. She’s not exactly trapped in a gilded cage, the visit to the country house was certainly a glimpse of gilt and glitter but it wasn’t her usual life, but the regular limits on her were far more than any of us would be happy with today.

I felt there were a few odd things about the book. The ending is a rather strange, though I think I liked it better than I would have liked alternatives, and since it’s foreshadowed in the prologue it bookends the story in a rather odd fashion. And the passage of time is either handled strangely or a missed something. I thought only a matter of weeks had passed but most of the war had passed. It certainly makes me want to look out more of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s other books though.