Susan Howatch

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Susan Howatch (July 14 1940-) is an author. She is mainly known for writing Family saga-type novels which follow related characters over large amounts of time.

Susan Howatch was born in Surrey, England, and went to school at 'Sutton High School. She obtained a degree in law from the King's College, London. She emigrated to the United States in 1964, where she married and began her career as a writer. She left the United States in 1975 and separated from her husband. She lived for a while in the Republic of Ireland before moving to England in 1980.

Her first novel was The Dark Shore, published in 1965. There followed several other gothic novels before she published the first of her family sagas Penmarric, which appears to tell of the fortunes and disputes of a Cornish family in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly over which controls the family mansion of Penmarric. As 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.

1 The Starbridge Series
2 Bibliography
- 2.1 The Starbridge Series
- 2.2 More recent

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The Starbridge Series

Howatch's most popular work is the Starbridge series. This series of six books sets out to tell the history of the Church of England through the twentieth century. Each of the six books is self-contained, and each is narrated by a different character. However, the main protagonist of each book also appears in the other books, allowing the author to present the same incidents from different viewpoints.

The action of all six books centres round the fictional Anglican diocese of Starbridge, which is supposedly in the west of England, and also features the Fordite monks, a fictional Anglican monastic order.

The three main characters in the Starbridge series represent different wings of the Church of England. Charles Ashworth reprsents the conservative wing; Jon Darrow the Anglo-Catholic wing and Neville Aysgarth the liberal wing. The first three books of the series (Glittering Images, Glamorous Power, Ultimate Prizes) begin in the 1930s, and continue through the Second World War. The second three (Scandalous Risks, Mystical Paths, Absolute Truths) take place in the 1960s.

The St Benet's trilogy, starting with The Wonder Worker (UK title A Question of Integrity), picks up the story of a major character, Nick Darrow, fifteen years after the events of the Starbridge series. The High Flyer and The Heartbreaker use some of the same characters from that book as minor characters.

Howatch has used some of the profits from her novels to found "The Starbridge Lectureship in Science and Theology", a professorship at Cambridge University devoted to linking the fields of science and religion.

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