Susan Howatch (born 14 July 1940) is a British author. Her writing career has been distinguished by family saga-type novels that describe the lives of related characters for long periods of time. Her later books have also become known for their religious and philosophical themes.
Early life
Susan Howatch was born on 14 July 1940, in Leatherhead, Surrey, England; as Susan Elizabeth Sturt. Her father was a stockbroker. As a child, she was educated at Sutton High School. Even though she was an only child and her father had died during the Second World War, she has often described her childhood to be a happy and satisfied one. After completing her school studies, she entered King's College in London and obtained her degree in law in 1961.
In 1964, she emigrated to the United States, where she worked as a secretary in New York City. She married Joseph Howatch (4 December 1935 – 25 April 2011), a sculptor and writer, that year and began her career as a writer, finding success almost immediately with her intricately detailed gothic novels.
The couple had a daughter in 1971. Upon separating from her husband in 1975, Howatch returned to the UK, then moved to the Republic of Ireland in 1976 before returning to the UK permanently in 1980.
After her latter return to England, Howatch found herself "rich, successful, and living exactly where I wanted to live," but feeling a spiritual emptiness that she ascribed to "trying to hold my divided self together" and questioning her life and what she should do with it.
She had settled in Salisbury out of love for the beauty of the city, but found herself increasingly drawn to Salisbury Cathedral; eventually she began to study Anglican Christianity in earnest. Quotations from contemporary Anglican writers, such as Glyn Simon, Bishop of Llandaff (1958–1970), often appear in her books as chapter headings. She experienced a spiritual epiphany, and concluded that she should continue to write novels, but to "set forth my discoveries in the light of faith, no matter how feeble and inadequate my beginner's faith was." This personal turning point culminated in Howatch's most successful and popular works, the Starbridge series.
Earlier novels and sagas
Her first novel was The Dark Shore (1965). She published several other "gothic" novels before she turned to the first of her family sagas, Penmarric (1971), which details the fortunes and disputes of the Penmar family in Cornwall during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An important theme of the story is how the mansion of Penmarric becomes controlled by various branches of the family. The family fortune was made in the Cornish tin mining industry, which is discussed throughout each one of the six parts, each with a different character as narrator. As is made clear by the chapter headings, the fortunes of the family closely parallel the Plantagenet family, including Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine, with the mansion representing the throne. It was adapted into a television series with the same name in 1979.
Howatch wrote the novel at her kitchen table in New Jersey. Publisher Michael Korda wrote, "It is a frequently stated basic belief of book publishing that somewhere in the country at any given moment some unknown woman is writing a major best-seller (usually referred to as 'the next Gone with the Wind) at her kitchen table while looking after her baby, but this was the first time I had experienced the phenomenon in real life. Susan Howatch had written her massive novel with one hand on the cradle and the other doing the typing, but, like most authors who succeed, she had never doubted that her book would be a bestseller." Korda asserted that, while reading the drafts, he noticed similarities to the Plantagenets and asked Howatch if that was the case. She replied that Shakespeare had borrowed most of his plots from other sources, and asked Korda if he thought anyone would notice.
Howatch is an Honorary Fellow of King's College, London, the University of Wales at Lampeter, and Sarum College in Salisbury. In 2012, Howatch was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Hope College. She currently resides in Leatherhead.
Bibliography
- The Dark Shore (1965)
- The Waiting Sands (1966)
- April's Grave (1967)
- Call in the Night (1967)
- The Shrouded Walls (1968)
- The Devil on Lammas Night (1970)
- Penmarric (1971)
- Cashelmara (1974)
- The Rich Are Different (1977)
- Sins of the Fathers (1980)
- The Wheel of Fortune (1984)
The Starbridge series
- Glittering Images (1987)
- Glamorous Powers (1988)
- Ultimate Prizes (1989)
- Scandalous Risks (1990)
- Mystical Paths (1992)
- Absolute Truths (1994)
The St. Benet's trilogy
- The Wonder Worker (US title) / A Question of Integrity (UK title) (1997)
- The High Flyer (2000)
- The Heartbreaker (2004)