Alice Thomas Ellis

Alice Thomas Ellis (born Ann Margaret Lindholm, 9 September 1932 – 8 March 2005) was an English writer and essayist born in Liverpool. She wrote numerous novels and of some non-fiction, including cookery books. Her married name was Anna Haycraft, but she continued to use her pseudonym. She spent some of her childhood as an evacuee in North Wales, a period she wrote about in A Welsh Childhood. She moved later to Camden in North London.

Life

Ellis's father was half Finnish, and her mother half Welsh. They belonged to the positivist and atheist Church of Humanity founded by Auguste Comte, but she left to become a Roman Catholic at the age of 19. She soon entered a convent as a postulant, but had to leave due to a health condition.

In 1956, she married Colin Haycraft, owner of the publishing company, Duckworth. They were married until his death in 1995. The couple had seven children, but their daughter Mary died in infancy at the age of two days, and their son Joshua spent ten months in a coma after an accident and died at the age of 19 in 1978. To him is dedicated The Birds of the Air, with the inscription:

All his beauty, wit and grace

Lie forever in one place.

He who sang and sprang and moved

Now, in death, is only loved.

Her first novel, The Sin Eater (1977) appeared under the pen name Alice Thomas Ellis, which she used in all her subsequent writing.

She was well known as a hostess; her skill at cooking and entertaining was a considerable asset to the Duckworth company. Her cookery books include All-natural Baby Food (published Fontana/Collins, 1977) and Darling, you shouldn't have gone to so much trouble, co-written with Caroline Blackwood. Caroline Blackwood and her husband, the American poet Robert Lowell, were frequent visitors to the Haycraft home. She was also a close friend of Beryl Bainbridge.

Her best-known novel was probably Unexplained Laughter (1985), which was adapted for British television, as was her Summerhouse Trilogy. Her novel The 27th Kingdom (1982) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her Home Life column in The Spectator was published in four volumes. All her work was livened by a dry, dark sense of humour. One of her most famous witticisms is: "There is no reciprocity. Men love women. Women love children. Children love hamsters. Hamsters don't love anyone".

As a conservative Roman Catholic who was unhappy with the changes in the Church triggered by the Second Vatican Council, she became a sharp polemicist in the press against what she believed were abuses of liturgy and practice that, she believed, led to a watering-down of the faith. Though her fiction often seems feminist, with women usually the leads, she opposed radical feminists' activism in the Church, and claimed that since the change from the Tridentine Mass she could barely bring herself to attend on Sundays. A regular columnist of the Catholic Herald newspaper, she criticised Derek Worlock, the former Archbishop of Liverpool, shortly after his death in 1996, accusing him of being responsible for a strong fall in Mass attendance in the previous decade. Cardinal Hume demanded and achieved her dismissal. Thereafter she was the Catholic Herald cookery columnist.

Ellis was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.

She survived a bout of lung cancer, but later developed secondary complications and died a year later, on 8 March 2005, at the age of 72.

Fiction

• The Sin Eater (1977)
• The Birds of the Air (1980)
• The 27th Kingdom (1982)
• The Other Side of the Fire (1983)
• Unexplained Laughter (1985)
• The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987) (Summerhouse Trilogy I.)
• The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1988) (Summerhouse Trilogy II.)
• The Fly in the Ointment (1990) (Summerhouse Trilogy III.)
• The Inn at the Edge of the World (1990)
• Pillars of Gold (1992)
• The Evening of Adam (1994) (stories)
• Fairy Tale (1996)
• Hotel Lucifer (1999)

External links

• List of her publications, University of South Carolina website
• Alice Thomas Ellis: obituary by Clare Colvin at The Guardian, 10 March 2005
• "Alice Thomas Ellis Dies at 72; Writer About Spiritual and Mundane," The New York Times, 12 March 2005