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Marylou
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« Reply #5 on: February 16, 2007, 10:33:PM » |
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Oh my! I had no idea she had died. May almighty God have mercy on her and may she rest in peace.
This will tell you a lot about her!
Obituary
Alice Thomas Ellis
Author, publisher and columnist who was a true bohemian yet an ardent Catholic
Clare Colvin
Thursday March 10, 2005
The Guardian
Alice Thomas Ellis, who has died aged 72, was known in the literary world under two names. As Alice Thomas Ellis, her pen name, she was a critically acclaimed novelist, whose fiction combined a sense of tragedy with black comedy; she was also columnist for several years of the popular Home Life series in the Spectator, a weekly dispatch featuring domesticity on the edge of chaos.
As Anna Haycraft, she was the respected fiction editor of Gerald Duckworth & Co, the publishing house run by her husband Colin Haycraft. She and Colin were famous for their spectacularly successful publishing parties at the Duckworth offices of the Old Piano Factory in London's Camden Town, or at their home in Gloucester Crescent, NW1, distinctive for its Gothic green window frames and overgrown garden. They came to epitomise north London literary bohemia, gathering in to their garden parties near neighbours such as Jonathan Miller, AJ Ayer, Kingsley Amis, Beryl Bainbridge, Oliver Sacks, and the odd tramp who had sniffed out the champagne cocktails.
Thomas Ellis's roots were in Wales, and several of her novels had a Welsh background. She was born in Liverpool as Anna Lindholm, daughter of Alexandra and John Lindholm, and educated at Bangor grammar school and Liverpool School of Art. At 19 she converted to Catholicism, and went into a convent as a postulant nun. She left when, after slipping a disc, the convent refused to take her back.
She then embarked on bohemian life in 1950s Chelsea. She dressed entirely in black - which in later years included the occasional Jean Muir - and earned her living working in a delicatessen where one of the customers was the young Colin Haycraft. They married in 1956.
Much of Thomas Ellis's life was absorbed by motherhood. She had seven children, of whom four sons, William, Thomas, Oliver, Arthur, and a daughter, Sarah, survive. A prematurely born daughter, Rosalind, died after two days; her second son Joshua died at the age of 19 after he fell off a roof at Euston station while trainspotting. She likened the continuing pain of his death to a form of amputation.
Her first novel, The Sin Eater, which exposed the hidden rancours of Irish, Welsh and English, was published in 1977 while he was in a coma. It was his death, she said, that made her go on writing. Her novels, spare, beautifully written, and often with a supernatural or macabre element, include The Birds Of The Air (1980), The 27th Kingdom (1982), The Other Side Of The Fire (1983), and Unexplained Laughter (1985). Her trilogy, The Clothes In The Wardrobe (1987), The Skeleton In The Cupboard (1988) and The Fly In The Ointment (1989), about infidelity and betrayal, was filmed for television as The Summerhouse, with Jeanne Moreau. The Inn At The Edge Of The World (1990) alluded to Celtic myth, and Pillars Of Gold (1992) was a satire on urban anonymity. A collection of stories, The Evening Of Adam (1994) and a novel about the mysterious appearance of a newborn baby, Fairy Tale (1996), followed.
Her non-fiction included: four collected volumes of Home Life, a memoir titled A Welsh Childhood, a polemic against the liberalising elements in the Catholic church, Serpent On The Rock (1994), and two books about food, the most recent being Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring: A Gallimaufry (2004).
The breadth of the subjects she dealt with indicates her complex personality. She wrote about strong and independent women, yet she was staunchly anti-feminist. She was averse to housework, but cooked delicious food for her friends and children's friends who dropped by, though she rarely sat down to eat, preferring to linger in the doorway, throwing an occasional remark into the conversation.
She took a relaxed view of her friends' tangled love lives and would listen sympathetically to the latest instalment at the kitchen table by the Aga, with wine and cigarettes, yet she was fiercely opposed to the liberal movement of the Catholic church - the idea of women priests was anathema. Her attack on the reforms of the late Derek Worlock, Archbishop of Liverpool, in the Catholic Herald brought the fury of the nation's Catholic bishops down on her head, and she was sacked as the Herald's columnist.
Unfazed, she moved on to the Oldie. I met Thomas Ellis in the early 1990s and she became the editor for my first novel, which Duckworth published. Anyone who ever experienced her as an editor would return for advice like a homing pigeon, even when moving on to another publishing house and another editor. Her most celebrated author, Beryl Bainbridge, remained with Duckworth for years, largely because of the confidence she felt in Anna Haycraft as editor. She combined a novelist's imagination with an editor's forensic skills, getting immediately to the heart of the problem, with an observation such as, "Lovely characters, darling, but where's the plot?"
The Haycrafts' later years in publishing were beset by financial problems. Small independent publishers were being squeezed by the big conglomerates. Thomas Ellis fulminated against the money-obsessed culture that had infiltrated the profession. Colin Haycraft died of a stroke in 1994, largely caused by financial worries, and Duckworth went through a period of upheaval with a change of ownership.
Thomas Ellis sold the house in Gloucester Crescent and moved to their second home, a farmhouse in Powys, north Wales, with her cat Basil (named after her old theological adversary, Cardinal Basil Hume). Surrounded by mountains, reached by a single track lane, with the nearest shop five miles away, it was not an ideal place for someone who did not drive, though she claimed to like the isolation. Friends, family and her children's former nanny, by then her secretary, Janet, would make the long journey to keep in touch with her. She worked on her latest book, finding endless fascination in the history of food and wrote columns for the Oldie and other journals - undertaking a considerable amount of work while appearing to do little other than lie on the sofa watching old films.
In 2003, she was diagnosed with lung cancer, and underwent an operation that appeared to be successful, but cancer was diagnosed again earlier this year.
She was a rare spirit who was generous in her life, inspirational in her writing, and whose death is a reminder of what has been lost in publishing today.
Amanda Craig writes:
When two novelists meet they are often as wary of each other as prize-fighters, but Anna was a kind of motherly mentor, dourly witty and always unexpected. I interviewed her for a magazine before she became famous, and when she found I was living nearby and struggling to write my first novel she offered a lifeline to literary London. Her house in Gloucester Crescent was stuffed with icons, pots and papers (she wrote all her novels and Home Life on her kitchen table), and her excellent parties were attended by the finest minds.
Anna and I put each other in our novels - I appeared as Lydia, the witty heroine of Unexplained Laughter, raging at being crossed in love, and she contributed to my own Ruth Viner, the wise mother of three boys with a huge house hung with laundry (and an escaped boa constrictor). Her voice, swooping with vowels, was one of the most attractive I've ever heard, and a number of men told me they would be overcome by her Magna Mater beauty as she stood beside her Aga.
She was impatient with feminism, pointing out that any woman who could cook could also poison. There was something both witchy and saintly about her, and in 1991 when I told her how my husband and I were desperate for a baby, she put her hands over my womb, giggled and said: "That should do the trick." It did.
She was a true bohemian, yet an ardent Catholic, believing the only point in sex was making babies. Anna loved all her children with passion, and never lost her faith that her dead son was waiting for her in heaven. I hope she is right about this, as about so much else.
· Alice Thomas Ellis (Anna Haycraft), writer, born September 9 1932; died March 8 2005
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