Alice Thomas Ellis, 72; Wry, Prolific Author With Staunch Catholic Views

Alice Thomas Ellis, the wry author of 21 novels and nonfiction works, including “The Sin Eater” and the cookbook “Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble,” has died. She was 72.

Ellis died March 8 in London of lung cancer.

In addition to her books, Ellis humorously described her own domestic foibles and dispensed advice in her Home Life columns for the London Spectator, and expressed her traditional religious views in a column for the Catholic Herald.

She was known for elegant writing and for biting, thought-provoking satire in fiction and nonfiction on such subjects as the Catholic Church, life, death, food, love, children and the existence of evil.

Much of her insight came from her own life as a staunch orthodox Roman Catholic who preferred Mass sung in Latin and as the disorganized matriarch of an unruly brood.

Born Anna Margaret Lindholm in Liverpool, England, and brought up in Wales, she dropped out of the Liverpool School of Art after converting to Catholicism at 18 and became a postulant at the Convent of Notre Dame de Namur in Liverpool. But, as she once told the London Independent, “I got slung out when I got a slipped disc. They thought it was incurable.”

She moved to London and was working in a delicatessen when she met journalist Colin Haycraft, accidentally giving him a meat pie when he had ordered apple. They soon married, and she gave birth to five sons and two daughters. Their daughter Mary died two days after being born and their son Joshua died at the age of 19 when he fell through a roof. Ellis’ second novel, “The Birds of the Air,” published in 1980, dealt with his death.

When Haycraft bought Duckworth’s publishing house in 1968, Ellis became his fiction editor. With her children growing up, she began to write, joking that she needed more books to fill her publishing list. She adopted the pseudonym Alice Thomas Ellis, although she wrote occasionally under the names Anna Margaret Lindholm and Anna Margaret Haycraft.

“I think I just realized that I hadn’t said anything for years and years and years, except: ‘Shut up, you little brat’ or ‘Come here,’ ” she told Associated Press in 1992, “and there were things I wanted to say, so I wrote them all down.”

Her first novel, “The Sin Eater,” which was set in Wales and blasted modernism in the Catholic Church, was published in 1977, when Ellis was 45.

Her 1982 novel “The 27th Kingdom” was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and her 1990 work “The Inn at the End of the World” won a Writers’ Guild award for best fiction.

“I only wrote one book to a structure, ‘The Inn at the Edge of the World,’ and figured out the whole plot before I started,” she told London’s Independent in 1996.

“It’s much easier that way, like painting by numbers. But for the others, I just start with a character or an idea, and hope for the best,” she said.

The Catholic Herald fired her for writing a column shortly after the 1996 death of Msgr. Derek Worlock, archbishop of Liverpool, that said his ecumenism had caused church attendance to plummet.

In addition to presiding over endless bohemian comings and goings at their London Victorian home, Ellis and her husband bought a farmhouse in Wales, and she spent long periods there with their children, setting much of her writing in Wales.

The Washington Post, in reviewing Ellis’ nonfiction “A Welsh Childhood” in 1997, praised her “splendid diatribe” against the gentrification of Wales from idyllic countryside into garish suburbia.

“She has sharp and amusing things to say about a lot of other things, including the pervasive character of Welsh rain, the stupidity of sheep, and the decline of railways,” the reviewer added.

But he also expressed impatience with Ellis’ “long discourses about fairies, witches, dragons, wizards and such” and pronounced her “obsessed with a past that never was.”

Ellis’ trademark irreverence, humor and insight were evident even in her two cookbooks.

The 1980 “Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble” was a collection of recipes made from such mundane ingredients as canned sardines, Spam, baked beans and liberal doses of alcohol. Her 2004 “Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring” surveyed food through the ages.

A trilogy of her novels -- “The Clothes in the Wardrobe” in 1987, “The Skeleton in the Cupboard” in 1988 and “The Fly in the Ointment” in 1989 -- was adapted for British television in 1992.

When the novels were published together in the U.S. as “The Summer House” in 1994, a New York Times reviewer called it “a work of astonishing illumination and delight.”

Widowed in 1995, Ellis is survived by five children.