Alice Thomas Ellis

Alice Thomas Ellis (born Anna Margaret Lindholm; 9 September 1932 – 8 March 2005) was a British writer and essayist born in Liverpool. She wrote numerous novels and some non-fiction, including cookery books. She was also known as Mrs. Anna Haycraft.

Life Ellis was born in Liverpool to John and Alexandra Lindholm. John was half Finnish, and Alexandra half Welsh. She spent part of her childhood as a World War II evacuee in North Wales, a period she wrote about in A Welsh Childhood. Thomas Ellis was educated at Bangor Grammar School and then entered the Liverpool School of Art. A member of the Church of Humanity, Ellis converted to Catholicism at age 19. She then dropped out of art school and spent six months in a convent. However, after she suffered a slipped disc, the religious order expelled her as unable to do physical labour.

In the 1950s she moved to Chelsea in London, where she embraced a Bohemian lifestyle and became known for wearing black. She was working in a coffee shop when she met Colin Haycraft. The couple married in 1956 and eventually had seven children. Their daughter Rosalind died two days after birth. Ellis's cookery books include All-natural Baby Food (Fontana/Collins, 1977) and Darling, you shouldn't have gone to so much trouble, co-written with Caroline Blackwood. Blackwood and her poet husband, Robert Lowell, were frequent visitors to the Haycraft home.

Her Home Life column in The Spectator was republished in four volumes. All her work was livened by a dry, dark sense of humour. As she put it, "There is no reciprocity. Men love women. Women love children. Children love hamsters. Hamsters don't love anyone".

As a conservative Roman Catholic, Ellis disliked the Second Vatican Council changes in church practices. In one book, she described them as "tide of sewage" and "Protestantized happy-clappy stuff." She was treated for lung cancer in 2003 and died of the disease two years later, on 8 March 2005. She was 72 years old.

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