Anna Haycraft

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. They had seven children, two of whom predeceased her.

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 convent as a postulant, but had to leave due to a health condition.

In 1956, she married the publisher Colin Haycraft, with whom she remained happily married until his death in 1995. The couple had seven children, raised in Anna's religion, but they were also struck by tragedy: their daughter Mary died in infancy at the age of two days, and their 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. Caroline Blackwood and her husband, the American poet Robert Lowell, were often in and out of the Haycraft home.

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 Roman Catholic who was unhappy with 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 on Derek Worlock, the former Archbishop of Liverpool, shortly after his death, accusing him of being responsible for 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

* [http://www.cla.sc.edu/engl/LitCheck/ellis.htm List of her publications, University of South Carolina website]
* [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1518283,00.html "Times" obituary]