Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Alice Thomas Ellis, a British novelist celebrated for her witty, unflinching dissections of middle-class domestic life, died on Tuesday in London. She was 72 and lived in Wales.

A spokeswoman for Ms. Ellis’s literary agent, Robert Kirby, confirmed the death. No cause was given, but several British newspapers reported that Ms. Ellis had been ill with lung cancer for some time.
Far better known in Britain than in the United States, Ms. Ellis’s fiction defied easy categorization. With its blend of the transcendently spiritual and the achingly mundane, her work was compared, variously, to that of Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark.

Alice Thomas Ellis was the pseudonym of Anna Margaret Haycraft, who under her real name was an editor at Gerald Duckworth, the London publishing house run by her husband, Colin Haycraft.

Under her pen name, Ms. Ellis wrote a dozen slender novels, most published by Duckworth, among them “The Sin Eater” (1977); “The Birds of the Air” (1980); “The Summer House,” a trilogy (Penguin, 1994); and “Fairy Tale” (Moyer Bell, 1998). Her novel “The 27th Kingdom” (1982) was finalist for the Booker Prize.

She also published several nonfiction works, including “A Welsh Childhood” (Moyer Bell, 1997) and “Serpent on the Rock: A Personal View of Christianity” (Hodder & Stoughton, 1994).

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