Alice Thomas Ellis

Novelist, columnist and mother superior of the 'chattering classes'

Anna Margaret Lindholm (Alice Thomas Ellis), writer: born Liverpool 9 September 1932; FRSL 1999; married 1956 Colin Haycraft (died 1994; four sons, one daughter, and one son and one daughter deceased); died London 8 March 2005.

Anna Margaret Lindholm (Alice Thomas Ellis), writer: born Liverpool 9 September 1932; FRSL 1999; married 1956 Colin Haycraft (died 1994; four sons, one daughter, and one son and one daughter deceased); died London 8 March 2005.

It was Alice Thomas Ellis's habit during the course of her adult life to announce, both in private and in public, that she had always wished to be a nun and that one day she would indeed join a contemplative order.

Though these announcements must have been dispiriting to her husband - the outstandingly gifted publisher Colin Haycraft - and to her numerous offspring, they also became part of her mystique, her public persona. Certainly she presided over her often unruly household like a mother superior and, as her influence grew over her husband's publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company, she also took care of her authors with determination, skill and kindness - qualities essential to a mother superior.

Anna Margaret Lindholm was born in Liverpool in 1932. Her father was of Russo-Finnish ancestry. Her mother was Welsh and a sense of Celtic gloom was never far from Anna Haycraft's field of vision. Her parents moved to Wales not long after she was born. She had a solitary childhood. She often walked alone in the Welsh hills. And it was to Wales that she would return again in the last years of her life.

After attending Bangor Grammar School, she moved to Liverpool School of Art. Her parents were members of the Church of Humanity (based on the rationalist ideas of Auguste Comte) but on arriving in Liverpool she rebelled against them as best she could by being received into the Roman Catholic Church. It was at Liverpool School of Art that she first met Beryl Bainbridge, who had not long before been expelled from Merchant Taylors' School in Formby.

Their meeting was indeed fortuitous. Both trained at art college, both became enormously accomplished and successful novelists and Beryl Bainbridge like her new-found friend also became a convert to the Church of Rome. Bainbridge's route to fame as a novelist included a spell as a successful actress. But Anna Lindholm's next step, at the age of 19, was to try her vocation as a nun with the Sisters of Notre Dame, in Liverpool. Her parents considered this move extremely odd. She lasted a year as a postulant but when, as she recounted, she slipped a disc the nuns no longer considered her prospects with them sufficiently promising. Anna departed for London. She was young, beautiful, with beguiling dark eyes but no job. The year was 1955, and she ended up finding temporary employment in a delicatessen on Chelsea Green.

Not far away on the top floor of a house in Markham Square, off the King's Road, lodged a young man named Colin Haycraft. With a double First in Greats from Oxford and a triple Blue, he was a strikingly handsome and extraordinarily talented young man. Haycraft had completed a stint working for his cousin, a rather humourless Wykehamist called Cecil Harmsworth King, at The Daily Mirror, and was about to be an early recruit to the publishing house of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, where he started their academic imprint - the World University Library. Colin Haycraft visited the delicatessen, fell immediately in love with the lady behind the counter with the beguiling eyes and in 1956 they were married. Their first child was born in Markham Square, on the top floor, eight months later.

Motherhood was one of Anna Haycraft's greatest enthusiasms. On being asked in later years who she considered the greatest woman in history she replied without hesitation that it was of course the Mother of God. Her attitude to marriage and family life she also summed up succinctly: "There is no reciprocity. Men love women. Women love children and children love hamsters."

Anna proceeded to give birth to six more children (four more boys and two girls). Farm Street, the Jesuit House of Residence in Mayfair, became her spiritual home. Most often dressed in black and wheeling a perambulator, she would be a frequent visitor to see the wise and elderly Father Martin D'Arcy. She absorbed the res catholica deep into her veins.

In the meantime, two significant events were taking place. The couple spotted and bought an 1840s house in Camden Town in Gloucester Crescent. It was dark and gloomy, covered in Virginia creeper and wisteria, and cost £4,000. At the same time, Colin decided with a partner, Tim Simon, to buy the distinguished but somewhat ailing publishing house of Duckworth, which had been founded by Virginia Woolf's half-brother in 1898 and was now in the ownership of one of the greatest of English eccentrics, Mervyn (Lord) Horder. Horder was the son of George V's doctor who had been in the room when the King expired and heard his celebrated dying words: "Bugger Bognor."

The stage was now set for this brilliant and glamorous young couple to shine - and to continue to multiply. (A sadness, however, which affected them both deeply was the death, after two days, of a daughter named Rosalind.) Colin Haycraft became the sole proprietor of Duckworth after the untimely death of his partner, of cancer, and moved the offices from Henrietta Street to Oval Road just a stone's throw from the couple's new home (small stone, long arm). The building into which they moved was called the Old Piano Factory.

In the vicinity by chance also lived Nick and Claire Tomalin, Ralph and Ursula Vaughan-Williams, A.J. Ayer and Dee Wells, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, and just down the road a key figure in the cast of characters, Beryl Bainbridge. So close was her friendship with Colin and Anna that the relationship seemed almost at times to be triangular.

Colin in the coming years built up a brilliant list of authors including many academics in his own field of studies, Classics. Authors fled from the university presses to be published with speed and skill and the line-up was astonishing. Michael Dummett, Kenneth Dover, Fergus Millar, Oliver Sacks and, as the years advanced, a new generation of scholars like Anthony Grayling and Paul Cartledge joined them. Anna Haycraft was a vital part of the enterprise. She positioned herself strategically in front of the Aga cooker, dispensing delicious food, sharp wit, encouragement and a lot of booze but always with kindness and generosity. The intellectually and creatively brilliant people who attended these dinner parties were the original group who were, as Jonathan Miller tells us, given the name "the chattering classes".

After a few years of bringing up small children and dispensing boeuf en daube to Colin's authors, Anna embarked on a new career as a writer herself. In 1977 she published her first novel, The Sin Eater, under the pseudonym Alice Thomas Ellis. She also became well known for her weekly columns, "Home Life", in The Spectator. In these she described the inhabitants and guests of her house in Gloucester Crescent, with sharp insight and sympathy. Readers were also introduced to Janet, who took care of all the domestic practicalities while Anna carried on as mother superior of the community. So successful were these columns that four collections of them were published as books (1986-89) and similar columns were then commissioned from Taki and one of the people to whom Anna remained close all her life, Jeffrey Bernard.

The Sin Eaters was a grim if brief story of the patriarch of a Welsh family. Later novels (including The 27th Kingdom, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1982) exploit more the witty and eccentric side of her talent, introducing elements of magic and miracle. From The Sin Eater right till her last novel ( Fairy Tale, 1996) Alice Thomas Ellis ploughed an exquisite furrow of black comedy shading into satire. In the last novel she returned again to her favourite territory of rural Wales.

Two of her novels were made into television dramas - Unexplained Laughter (1985, filmed in 1988 with Diana Rigg and Elaine Page) and The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987, as Clothes in the Wardrobe, 1992, with Jeanne Moreau, Joan Plowright and Julie Walters).

All this seemed to outsiders like a charmed existence. But in 1978, at the age of 19, Josh, the Haycrafts' second son, fell off a railway bridge and received fatal injuries. To prolong the torture, he lived for some months in a coma. The early death of a child is what most parents fear above all else. Its consequences for a family and for the marital relationship of the parents can be traumatic. Grief, anger and guilt are deep-seated emotions. A sword had pierced Anna Haycraft's heart.

Anna plunged herself into her role as Duckworth's fiction editor and with editorial skill and profound human sympathy encouraged the talent of numerous writers. First and above all was her encouragement of her close friend Beryl Bainbridge, short-listed five times for the Booker Prize. But among other talents she nurtured were those of her friend Caroline Blackwood, Andrew Barrow, Patrice Chaplin and Phil Rickman.

By the end of the Eighties however, Duckworth like many small independent publishers ran into financial difficulties. Haycraft sold parts of his business or a controlling interest in succession to an Egyptian millionaire, to Michael Estorick, founder of the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in Islington, and to the Rowntree Trust. But the human cost of these initiatives was enormous on the Haycraft family. On one occasion, Colin was locked out of his own office building. The atmosphere in Gloucester Crescent changed. Anna remained at her Aga, smoking Silk Cut cigarettes. Colin made things worse by defaming two of the Rowntree Trustees on air when his natural wit got the better of him. His debts mounted.

Some months before his death, he appointed me his successor at Duckworth but in September 1994 he died of a stroke, weighed down by disappointment and a sense of failure.

Through these last years of her husband's life, Anna Haycraft suffered periods of depression. But the anger she thus turned in on itself looked for an object. Ultimately the object became the liberal wing of the Roman Catholic Church and the hierarchy of English Catholic bishops in particular. Her anger was the product of her own intuitive sense of what was right and wrong and was not based on carefully examined theological reflection. There was a long list of her personal dislikes - ranging from nuns in slacks and acrylan jumpers to liturgical innovators who imported twanging guitars and ruined her sense of the adoration and worship of God. As change and decay set in all around that she saw, she fought more and more fiercely for doctrinal orthodoxy, intellectual and moral certainty and a firm commitment to the teaching of the Catholic Church as she perceived it.

In 1996, her inner rage finally burst out in print and in the pages of The Catholic Herald against Archbishop Derek Worlock of Liverpool, who three months previously had died of cancer. She decided in no mean terms to tell the archbishop's admirers why of the half a million Catholics in Liverpool only 100,000 attended Mass on Sunday. Basically, she claimed he was responsible.

Sacked by The Catholic Herald as a columnist at the prompting of the English hierarchy, Alice Thomas Ellis finally found a welcome home in the pages of The Oldie magazine, where she wrote a column called "The God Slot" for her dear friend of long standing its editor, Richard Ingrams.

In 2004, a collection of her religious writings was published under the title God Has Not Changed.

Robin Baird-Smith