Elizabeth Jane Howard: the novelist at 90 Do you hate all that? Hate it. Is it the indignity? I don't think it's about dignity. She gazes into the middle distance and then smiles, her face softening. I'm just hopelessly impatient. Elizabeth Jane Howard - Jane to her friends - is the great underrated novelist of the post-war period. For years, she was really more famous for being the muse of her more renowned associates (affairs with Arthur Koestler, Kenneth Tynan, Laurie Lee, Cecil Day-Lewis; marriage to Kingsley Amis). Her first book, The Beautiful Visit, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1951, and her subsequent novels, such intricate masterpieces of style and tone as The Long View and The Sea Change, were widely praised, but she was never shortlisted for the Booker. One was rather sad about that. I have missed the bus now. It is for The Cazalet Chronicles that she is most known and loved - the unravelling semi-autobiographical saga of an upper-middle-class family in the period around the Second World War, the bulk of which she wrote in a flurry in the 1990s. Broadcast on Radio 4 earlier this year, the novels have sold more than one million copies. With publication of the fifth volume, All Change, imminent when we meet (it is published on 7 November), Twitter is tweeting, the phone keeps ringing, photographers keep arriving ("Being photographed: I hate.It bores me to tears"). If she was for many people a secret pleasure, the secret is now out. Elizabeth Jane Howard with Kingsley Amis at their wedding reception in 1965 (Rex) When I ask what this feels like, she says, "My favourite review was for Marking Time [the second volume], and came from my builder. He said, "My wife bought your book. She got through it. "Oh, Mr Hood," I said. I am so glad. How put-downing. Her face breaks again into a broad smile. I love those remarks. For a person of such apparently strong opinions and fearsome public aspect, Howard is surprisingly self-deprecating. Rigorous self-appraisal, together with open-eyed honesty, is a habit with her. In her autobiography Slipstream, she writes of the lack of confidence that's dogged her since childhood. Her mother preferred her two brothers. When she died we discovered she had kept all their letters and not one of mine, which was a bit of a pointer. And her father's affection segued into sexual abuse. The Cazalet cousins, are all "facets" of her, she says, but it is Louise who suffers this fate. In search of security, she married Peter Scott, the son of the explorer Captain Scott, at 19, and had a baby 10 months later. I was a rotten mother, absolutely awful. I was too young. Her marriage ended after the war. I was waiting for it to end. I really didn't think I could leave him while he was fighting. And in the fall-out, she left her daughter, Nicola, to be brought up by a nanny in somebody else's house, and made a living as a writer, reading as much as she could to compensate for a patchy education, muddling precariously between men - many married. She tells me that she has always wanted a sister - "Dreadfully - I spent the whole of my life looking for one in a useless way." I wonder if the affairs came about because she was looking for a different kind of closeness? I'm afraid that's one of the drawbacks of people liking the look of you. They never really interested me very much, my looks. I wanted to be liked for other things. She lets out a small laugh. So there you are. It was Laurie Lee, married to her friend Cathy ("She was jolly sweet about the whole thing"), who belatedly awakened her sexually. Yes he was wonderful for me. He was so funny. We had a really jolly time. "The last postcard he sent me said, "I still think of you with rapture." I keep that. He was very warm. She says that Cathy "knew I didn't want to marry him." Really? I would never have been enough. She remained friends with both of them, becoming godmother to their daughter, throughout her second marriage, to Jim Douglas-Henry ("enough said about that the better") and her third to Kingsley Amis, which lasted almost 20 years. Both of these relationships were disappointing sexually. Kingsley felt women were for f - and cooking. He stopped wanting to f - because if you get really very drunk all the time you stop being able to do it. That was no good. And he hated food. He would say, "This isn't very nice," or, worse, "This is a bit authentic."" She laughs, then coughs, giving her chest a bash. Put that in. It's funny. He could be terribly funny. That was one of the lovely things about him, really. Amis wouldn't see her after she left him - in his Memoirs he refers to her mostly as "my second wife." Did that upset her? He never forgave me, I'm afraid. I didn't realise the depths of his phobias until I read Mart's [Martin Amis's] autobiography Experience, his terror of being alone. He concealed it really, and that was a great mistake. If I had known, I think I would have been better at dealing with it. She is still in touch with Mart, her stepson. He always says I got him educated and it is absolutely true. I gave him a copy of Pride and Prejudice and made him read it. But I tried just as hard with Sally and Philip, his siblings, and got nowhere, so it might have happened anyway. Has she seen him recently? She leans forward conspiratorially. They are awfully funny, the Amises. Monkey, my brother [otherwise known as Colin], who is always frightfully sharp on things like this, says they suffer from EFT - Easier for Them syndrome. You are absolutely passive in the relationship. You don't ring somebody up. You don't write to them. Martin is always very affable, when we meet, but he has been in England for quite a long time this year and he hasn't rung me up. I feel a bit miffed about that, actually. Since her marriage ended in 1983, she has ben largely alone - though there was a brief affair with a con man, who wheedled his way into her life (researching it scrupulously) after hearing her on Desert Island Discs. She was recovering from cancer of the bowel at the time, and vulnerable: "My guard was down." She used this experience when it was over in her 1999 novel Falling. I did still want a steady, complete relationship and I thought for a bit I was going to have that. I think his plan was probably pretty murky. To bump you off to get the house? Something like that. It was an awful shock. It shook me up very much. I think up until then I had a naïve view that people didn't lie about love or art, that those two things you had to be absolutely truthful about all the time. I made the terrible assumption that other people felt the same, and they don't. I think he never had any feelings for me at all. She gives a small shudder. At Kingsley Amis's memorial service, with his first wife, Lady Kilmarnock Anyone who has a very good long marriage, I do envy them. In terms of the Cazalets, I used to feel very Louise-ish, now I see a lot of Clary in me. She is unattractively untidy, and she cries a lot, which I used to do. But she has also done what I would have liked to do: she has married a man with whom she really gets on, much older than she is, and therefore has a kind of stability. I don't think I ever encountered that kind of "elective affinity." I think Goethe let me down there. I make one character say in After Julius that the person they should have married was killed in the war. I think that is probably true for me. A lot of my friends were killed, right and left, you know, all the time. The house she lives in now - a rambling 18th-century cottage in Suffolk - has been her home for 21 years, longer than anywhere else. Travelling is hard these days - the arthritis and the asthma - and she hasn't been to London on more than a day trip in four years. It's all stairs and things which I can't cope with. She says she feels terrible pangs when people describe their holidays to her. I wish I could go back to India, which I only went to once, or Mexico - I was riveted by that. But that would only be possible if I were a multimillionaire with an entourage. She makes a face. Which I am not. She gazes around her study - lined with pictures and books, comfy furniture, rugs. I am stuck here, but it is a very nice place to be stuck. People are noticeably nicer around here than anywhere else I have ever been. And I love my house. All Change is about what happens when a family like mine are absolutely useless at what they are supposed to be doing; the Cazalets and the Howards are no good as businessmen at all. I bought this house with money I have earned and I am proud of that. But really, as a Howard, I should be living in a horrible flat now, having sold my house for much too little and then finding I had to pay much too much for a new one. That's what they all do. She pauses and takes a sip of her coffee. "Poor dears," she adds. Hopeless. Work continues to sustain her. She gets up every day at 8.30am, takes "millions of pills" and is usually down at her desk at 10.30am. She loved picking up the Cazalets where she left off, though it was "absolute hell from a continuity point of view. You keep on having to remember what you called someone's chauffeur 15 years ago. It's quite hard work, that. She tends to knock off at 1.30pm. That's about all I can do. Lunch, a nap. By five o'clock, I haven't got much left in me. I can read, and sew, and I can watch ghastly television. I don't see Downton Abbey - I don't sink that low. But I like detective programmes, and anything about animals. I love seeing films about how other people live... however appalling it is. I have got no patience with people who say, "I couldn't bear that - it was too painful." You think, "You're so soft and wimpish, you can't even bear an hour and a half of something that is other people's lives."" Friends visit a lot - this weekend her brother is coming to stay, "along with Judith Keppel [the gardener and winner of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?] and my friend Patricia Routledge." She has a sous-chef coming to help her cook - kedgeree, chicken, coffee ice cream (the secret is Camp Coffee). She gestures to the walking-frame. With that damn thing you can't carry anything. It's terribly frustrating. Her book club was here last night, and a meeting of the women's group she has been a member of for 30 years is imminent. We support each other. I find it tremendously valuable. I can honestly say it was this that grew me up, made me feel not so worthless or anxious or always looking for some kind of approval. Best of all, her daughter Nicola, a jewellery designer, and her "very nice" husband live nearby. I love them both. It is wonderful to have them, there, very solidly. I see Nicola nearly every day. There is always some water that hasn't gone under the bridge. But that is manageable. She has four grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren. I am a better granny than I was a mum. I wouldn't go further than that. Does she worry about death? I think I'm afraid of it. One of the drawbacks if you don't believe in Heaven or God, as I don't, is that you are left thinking of yourself as a bit of dandelion seed, really - you go into the earth and that will be that. Some people are very good at not minding, but I don't want to leave my friends. And I've been through enough already to know I don't want to die in pain. It's too exhausting and difficult. She has been gazing at me very intently, but she looks away now. I'd rather slip out. "All Change" (Mantle) by Elizabeth Jane Howard, is available from Telegraph Books