Who was Alice Thomas Ellis?

Alice Thomas Ellis was the penname for fiction writer and columnist Anna Haycraft. Born Anna Margaret Lindholm in 1932 in Liverpool, England, Ellis spent part of her childhood in Wales, which features in much of her writing and is the subject of her memoir, A Welsh Childhood. This background, a solitary childhood in Wales, left a lasting impression on Ellis’s inner landscape, as one writer noted, “a sense of Celtic gloom was never far from Anna Haycraft’s field of vision.” Her parents, Alexandra and John Lindholm, belonged to the atheist Church of Humanity.

Whether due to British reserve or the success of a penname, precious little is readily available about the details of her early life to the casual researcher. Though described as friendly and warm, Ellis appears as an historical figure rather aloof, shielded by a pseudonym and choosing to spend her last days in a remote Welsh farmhouse. Perhaps what to the nosy busybody appears aloofness is simply the trappings of a private person, such a rare phenomenon in modernity.

At the age of 19, Ellis entered the Catholic church. According to an interviewer, “she was exposed to the Church through some Catholic relatives (her father’s sister had married a Catholic) and Liverpool’s large Catholic population. Her early impressions of the Faith were positive. As she explained in Serpent on the Rock, ‘It is presently de rigueur to claim that Catholicism thirty-odd years ago was repressive, hidebound and frightening, but I found in it great richness and an abundance of people who made me laugh.’”

Shortly after her becoming Catholic, Ellis entered a convent as a postulant. She left after a back injury.

In the 1950s, Ellis studied at the College of Art in Chelsea, which offered her a further taste of atheism and Communism. Art schools, according to Ellis, were “hotbeds of anarchy.” One description of Ellis’s time in art school states, “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.”

How someone went from atheism and liberal art school to the Catholic church is an interesting one, never given a full and satisfactory answer in anyone’s biography. About her conversion, Ellis said, “Then after due time and instruction I became a Catholic because I no longer found it possible to disbelieve in God…. I felt entirely at home with the conviction, aims and rituals of the Church and secure in the certainty that it was immune from frivolous change and the pressures of fashion; primarily concerned with the numinous rather than with the social and political concerns of its members.”

Ellis’s husband ran the publishing house Gerald Duckworth & Co, and Ellis became a highly valued editor for the publisher for decades.

In the years that followed, the Haycrafts had seven children: William, Joshua, Thomas, Oliver, Arthur, Sarah, and Rosalind. Born prematurely, Rosaland died just two days after birth. At the age of 19, Joshua was injured and was in a coma for 10 months before his death. The grief was immense for Ellis. One obituary states, “She likened the continuing pain of his death to a form of amputation.”

Ellis’s second novel, Birds of the Air is dedicated to Joshua with the words:

All his beauty, wit and grace

Lie forever in one place.

He who sang and sprang and moved

Now, in death, is only loved.

Ellis’s novels won critical acclaim in Britain but never garnered widespread attention in the United States. Some of Ellis’s non-fiction writing has found more international appeal, in particular her long-running column for the Spectator, “Home Life,” continues to find fans around the world. The collection of brief essays, published in four volumes, are hard to describe. Covering the travails of domestic life, the sardonic meditations offer portraits at once intimately familiar and kept at a distance. Ellis describes vices and daily rituals in arresting detail, but there is an impenetrable veil that prevents unbridled familiarity. For example, Ellis refers to her husband only as “Someone,” a mysterious figure given only nondescript sketches with his full presence reserved for life off-the-page. A bit like reading the musings of Evelyn Waugh if he were a housewife, the sketch of family life in the 1980s is packed with incomprehensible Britishisms and witty asides.

Throughout her non-fiction, Ellis paints a picture of herself as a disheveled matron on the verge of domestic disaster. Yet, by all accounts, Ellis was an excellent cook, which explains the cook books she authored, and she produced an astonishing volume of work, both writing and editing, while raising six children with only the help of her trusty nanny and later secretary, Janet. She refers only glancingly to her work as a writer and editor, despite the fact that it surely figured prominently in her daily living. As one writer put it, “The breadth of the subjects she dealt with indicates her complex personality.”

Ellis’s novels have been described as darkly comedic and even Gothic. In her fiction she sometimes aired her personal opinions, especially on matters of Catholicism, though the novels are not overtly religious. For example, in her first novel, The Sin Eaters, Ellis, who despised the changes brought about “in the spirit of Vatican II,” wrote, “It is as though…one’s revered, dignified and darling old mother had slapped on a mini-skirt and fishnet tights and started ogling strangers. A kind of menopausal madness, a sudden yearning to be attractive to all. It is tragic and hilarious and awfully embarrassing. And of course, those who knew her before feel a great sense of betrayal and can’t bring themselves to go and see her any more.”

Here, you get a taste of Ellis’s acerbic wit. With passages such as these, Peter Ackroyd described The Sin Eater as depicting “the relentlessness of domestic life, the knives only just sheathed in time, the tart little phrases bouncing around like Molotov cocktails.”

To the end, Ellis was renowned for her warmth and hospitality, whether hosting publishing parties, coaching authors, or inviting reviewers warmly into her home. She is remembered for her criticism of authors who worked with her, peppered with a feeling of maternal concern, including such gems as, “Lovely characters, darling, but where’s the plot?”

Throughout her adult life, Ellis was known to announce that she intended to be a nun and one day she would join a contemplative order. This perhaps goes a long way to explaining the isolation of her home in Wales, to which devoted friends and relatives would arduously journey to see her in her final years.

In an interview about her Catholicism, she said, “Anarchy is not freedom. One of the nuns told me, ‘Once you’re inside the Church, you can shake a pretty loose leg.’ It gave you much more freedom once you knew the rules than just floundering around in this complete permissiveness and liberalism. You’ve got the structure, and within that you can be very free, and you can actually be very happy.” In a life defined by the traditional Catholic church, Ellis lived a unique life of taste and experience. She seemed not to suffer a need to share her thoughts, but when she did, they found, and continue to find, eager and amused readers.