Love all, By Elizabeth Jane Howard

Since her debut, The Beautiful Visit in 1950, Elizabeth Jane Howard's ever-popular fiction has been concerned with the romantic entanglements of the upper middle-classes. Her latest novel, set in the late Sixties, finds its author, now 85, as clear-sighted about marriage, sex and love as that other great chronicler of pastoral passions, Jane Austen – a writer frequently invoked here.

Love All opens with the end of an affair. Recently dumped by a married man, Persephone ("Percy") Plover decides to accompany her elderly spinster aunt Florence ("Floy") on a garden-designing job in the West Country. Here she is introduced into local society and, like many a Howard heroine, inadvertently causes ripples in a small pond. Befriended by her aunt's patron, self-made millionaire Jack Curtis, the new owner of Melton House, she also becomes close to the Musgrove siblings, Mary and Thomas. Former owners of the hall, they now share a shabby farmhouse on the estate. As she did in her family saga, the Cazalet Chronicles, Howard handles a large cast of characters by switching from one point of view to another, and allowing different strands of the story to emerge. The novel's key players are a damaged lot, reeling either from romantic misadventures or a benighted childhood.

One of the pleasures of Howard's writing is the trouble she takes to paint the domestic scene. From letting us know what's bubbling on the stove – usually a rabbit stew – to the parlous state of the coconut matting, the reader is invited to take up residence. The novel may be set in the Swinging Sixties, but a post-war austerity hangs over both Howard's pinched interiors and the repressed emotional lives of her misguided characters. Towards the end, the redoubtable Aunt Floy complains that everyone seeks her out for advice. Howard herself is something of an Aunt Floy, passing comment and benign judgment. With their romantic dilemmas drip-fed to us over the course of the novel, it's hard not to end up willing even the wettest of characters to override their innate politesse and seize the day.

Howard has described herself as playing "second fiddle" to the Amises, père et fils. But with 13 distinguished novels under her belt and another in progress, it's about time she took a bow of her own.