Elizabeth Jane Howard, whose saga of a wealthy English family living in the shadow of war enchanted readers a generation ahead of “Downton Abbey,” died on Thursday, her friend and publicist said. She was 90.
Jacqui Graham said that Howard died on Thursday at her home in Bungay, England. No details as to the cause of death were immediately available.
Graham described Howard who went by Jane as “remarkably odd, and interesting, and fabulous, and brave.”
“She walked away from a marriage, which was a very advantageous one, to do what she wanted to do, which was write. She lived her life in a way that she wanted to live it in, in a way that women at that time just didn’t have the nerve. She had the nerve.”
Born in 1923, Howard had little in the way of formal education, but she read voraciously “huge amounts of Shakespeare and other classics,” Graham said. “When she ran out of stuff she wrote her own things.”
“As she put it herself, Jane was a bit of bolter,” Graham said. “She didn’t put with up things she wasn’t going to put up with.”
“It preceded, by a long way, Downton Abbey,” said Graham. “People love reading family sagas set slightly in the past not too far back (but) close enough for you to touch, within living memory. She unconsciously got that long before (Downton Abbey creator) Julian Fellowes.”
Funeral arrangements weren’t immediately available. Howard is survived by Nicola, her daughter from her marriage to Scott.
