Her writing career has been distinguished by family saga-type novels that describe the lives of related characters for long periods of time.
Quotations from contemporary Anglican writers, such as Glyn Simon, Bishop of Llandaff (1958–1970), often appear in her books as chapter headings.
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.
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.
[6] Howatch followed a similar theme in her vast saga, The Wheel of Fortune, where the story of the Godwin family of Oxmoon in Gower, South Wales, is in fact a re-creation in a modern form of the story of the Plantagenet family of Edward III of England, the modern characters being created from those of his eldest son Edward of Woodstock (The Black Prince) and his wife Joan of Kent, John of Gaunt and his mistress, later wife, Katherine Swynford, Richard II (son of Edward of Woodstock), Henry IV (son of John of Gaunt) and Henry IV's eldest son King Henry V. Again the mansion represents the throne.
The first three books of the series (Glittering Images, Glamorous Powers, Ultimate Prizes) begin in the 1930s and continue through World War II.
Glittering Images is narrated by the Reverend Dr Charles Ashworth, a Cambridge academic who undergoes something of a spiritual and nervous breakdown after being sent by the Archbishop of Canterbury to secretly investigate possible sexual transgressions in the household of the Bishop of Starbridge.
Ashworth is helped to recover and to realize the source of his problems by Father Jonathan Darrow, the widowed abbot of Grantchester Abbey of the Fordite monks.
Scandalous Risks follows Aysgarth to a canonry of Westminster Abbey and back to Starbridge, where he becomes dean of the cathedral and Ashworth becomes a bishop.
It is narrated by Venetia Flaxton, a young aristocrat who risks great scandal by beginning a relationship with the married Aysgarth, her father's best friend.
Absolute Truths comes full circle and is narrated by a much older but still troubled Charles Ashworth, thirty-one years after he was originally encountered in the first of the books.
A Question of Integrity (given the title The Wonder Worker in the United States), picks up the story of Nicholas Darrow twenty years after the last of the Starbridge novels.
His own life is greatly affected by events taking place at the centre, especially after he meets Alice Fletcher, an insecure new worker there, and is forced to reassess his beliefs and commitments as a result.
Her outwardly successful life, complete with highly compensated career and suitable marriage, undergoes profound changes after harrowing events smacking of the occult begin to occur, which reveal that things are not what they seem.