Susan Howatch

Susan Howatch is one of my favourite authors and I've been re reading her books over and over again since the 1970s. She has always been a very private person, and not much is known about her. She was born in Surrey in 1940 and then studied law after leaving school. However, she found practical law very boring and gave it up after a year or so, to go to the US. In the early 1960s the UK was a dull and restrictive society and she found America more stimulating. She worked in a record company and then married and had a child. She began to write books at her kitchen table.... and her first long novel was the family Saga Penmarric which became a best seller. She wrote six short Gothic style novels in the early 70s, as training for the long saga and Penmarric made her a fortune. It was adapted for TV by the BBC later on. She then wrote Cashelmara a novel set in Victorian England and Ireland and based, like Penmarric on the history of the Plantagenet kings. Edward de Salis, the first narrator of the book is based on Edward I. After these 2 novels, she wrote 2 based on Ancient Rome, The Rich are Different, and Sins of the Fathers, which were loosely based on the story of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Mark Antony and Octavian. She returned to the UK after her marriage broke up and lived for a few years in Ireland. She then went back to England and found that while she was very rich and successful she was unhappy. She got interested in religion and began to study the history of the Church of England. She became interested in the relationship between science and religion and founded an award for the study of religion and science with some of the money she made in her Starbridge novels.