Anna Haycraft
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Anna Haycraft was the real name of the British writer who wrote as Alice Thomas Ellis (September 9 1932 – March 8 2005). She was the author of numerous novels, and also of some non-fiction, including cookery books.
Originally Anna Lindholm, she was half-Finnish, half-Welsh and spent part of her childhood as an evacuee in North Wales, a period she later wrote about in A Welsh Childhood. She later lived in North London and was married to Colin Haycraft, owner of the publishing company Duckworth. She was a conservative Roman Catholic by conversion.
Life
Her parents 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. Shortly afterwards, she entered a monastery as a postulant, but had to leave due to a health condition. In 1956, she married her husband Colin Haycraft with whom she remained happily married until his death in 1995. The couple had seven children, but was also struck by tragedy: daughter Mary died in infancy at the age of two days and son Joshua was killed in an accident while still in his teens.
The Birds of the Air is dedicated to her son Joshua, with the following 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.
Haycraft published her first novel The Sin Eater in 1977 under the pen name of Alice Thomas Ellis, which she used in all her following writing.
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. 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.
As a conservative Catholic who was unhappy what the changes in the Catholic Church triggered by the Second Vatican Council, she became a sharp polemicist in the press against what she felt were abuses of liturgy and practice that led to a watering-down of the faith.
As a regular columnist of the Catholic Herald newspaper, she launched a sharp attack in 1996 against Derek Worlock, the former Archbishop of Liverpool, shortly after his death, accusing him of being responsible of a strong fall in Mass attendance in the previous decade. After protests from readers of the newspaper she was sacked as a columnist, though the staff and some others took her side.
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 (http://www.cla.sc.edu/engl/LitCheck/ellis.htm)
- Times obituary (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1518283,00.html)cy:Alice Thomas Ellis