Elizabeth Jane Howard's publisher compares her with Jane Austen. "Something in Disguise" lacks the Austen richness of texture and gentle touch and investigates private thoughts as a structural concession to modernity—but the comparison is not entirely unjustified. Like a substantial handful of contemporary English writers—among them Elizabeth Taylor and, more eccentrically, Henry Green and the late Ivy Compton-Burnett—Miss Howard is a novelist of manners. (Amusingly and quite improbably, one of the characters in this her fifth novel enjoys the very writers I've mentioned.) And like Jane Austen, these novelists of manners tend to rely on the milieu of the generally well-off, often idle, upper middle class….

["After Julius"] revolved around the ultimately too easy resolution of the problems of a mother and two daughters during a weekend in the country. And in its way the book was rather like a formal English country weekend: undemandingly...