Alice Thomas Ellis, who has died aged 72, was known in the literary world under two names. As Alice Thomas Ellis, her pen name, she was a critically acclaimed novelist, whose fiction combined a sense of tragedy with black comedy; she was also columnist for several years of the popular Home Life series in the Spectator, a weekly dispatch featuring domesticity on the edge of chaos.
As Anna Haycraft, she was the respected fiction editor of Gerald Duckworth & Co, the London publishing house run by her husband, Colin Haycraft. The two were famous for their spectacularly successful publishing parties. They came to epitomise north London literary bohemia, gathering in to their garden parties near neighbours such as Jonathan Miller, AJ Ayer, Kingsley Amis, Beryl Bainbridge, Oliver Sacks and the odd tramp.
Thomas Ellis's roots were in Wales - several of her novels had a Welsh background. She was born in Liverpool as Anna Lindholm, daughter of Alexandra and John Lindholm, and educated at Bangor Grammar School and Liverpool School of Art. At 19 she converted to Catholicism and went into a convent as a postulant nun. She left when, after slipping a disc, the convent refused to take her back.
She then embarked on bohemian life in 1950s Chelsea. She dressed entirely in black and earned her living working in a delicatessen where one of the customers was the young Colin Haycraft. They married in 1956.
Much of Thomas Ellis's life was absorbed by motherhood. She had seven children, of whom four sons, William, Thomas, Oliver, Arthur, and a daughter, Sarah, survive. A prematurely born daughter, Rosalind, died after two days; her second son, Joshua, died at the age of 19 after he fell off a roof at Euston station while trainspotting. She likened the continuing pain of his death to a form of amputation.
Her first novel, The Sin Eater, which exposed the hidden rancours of Irish, Welsh and English, was published in 1977 while he was in a coma. It was his death, she said, that made her go on writing. Her novels, spare, beautifully written and often with a supernatural or macabre element, include The Birds of the Air (1980), The 27th Kingdom (1982), The Other Side of the Fire (1983), and Unexplained Laughter (1985). Her trilogy, The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987), The Skeleton in the Cupboard (1988) and The Fly in the Ointment (1989), about infidelity and betrayal, was filmed for television as The Summerhouse, with Jeanne Moreau.
The Inn at the Edge of the World (1990) alluded to Celtic myth, and Pillars of Gold (1992) was a satire on urban anonymity. A collection of stories, The Evening of Adam (1994) and a novel about the mysterious appearance of a newborn baby, Fairy Tale (1996), followed.
Her non-fiction included: four collected volumes of Home Life, a memoir titled A Welsh Childhood, a polemic against the liberalising elements in the Catholic Church, Serpent on the Rock (1994), and two books about food, the most recent being Fish, Flesh and Good Red Herring: A Gallimaufry (2004).
The breadth of the subjects she dealt with indicates her complex personality. She wrote about strong and independent women, yet she was staunchly anti-feminist. She was averse to housework, but cooked delicious food for her friends and children's friends who dropped by, though she rarely sat down to eat, preferring to linger in the doorway, throwing an occasional remark into the conversation.
Anyone who experienced her as an editor would return for advice like a homing pigeon, even when moving on to another publishing house and another editor. Her most celebrated author, Beryl Bainbridge, remained with Duckworth for years, largely because of the confidence she felt in Anna Haycraft as editor. She combined a novelist's imagination with an editor's forensic skills.
Colin Haycraft died of a stroke in 1994, largely caused by financial worries, and Duckworth went through a period of upheaval with a change of ownership.
In 2003, she was diagnosed with lung cancer and underwent an operation that appeared to be successful, but cancer was diagnosed again earlier this year.
She was a rare spirit who was generous in her life, inspirational in her writing, and whose death is a reminder of what has been lost in publishing today.
Alice Thomas Ellis (Anna Haycraft): born September 9th, 1932; died March 8th, 2005