The Gospels of Alice Thomas Ellis

The British novelist Alice Thomas Ellis created shrewd and formidable female characters who have little patience with men. An outspoken Catholic, she deplored feminism and the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Ellis grew up in the Welsh countryside, cherishing the remote beauty of her mother's native land, and returned to Wales in her later years. She was also a London bohemian, hosting frequent dinner parties for authors and academics and otherwise assisting her husband, Colin Haycraft, in running the small prestigious Duckworth Press. When she turned to fiction writing in her mid-forties, she earned acclaim for mysterious fantasy-tinged novels that drew upon the mythology of the British Isles. She also forged biting comedies of manners, showing a sharp eye for class differences and an acute ear for contemporary speech.

At her death in 2005 as a celebrated or notorious author—depending on your point of view and which of her books you read—Alice Thomas Ellis (a pseudonym of Anna Haycraft) remained relatively unknown in the United States, her work available mainly in small-press editions favoring flowery wallpaper designs. Perhaps her career of contradictions, together with subject matter unfamiliar to American readers, has made her difficult to categorize and absorb. In a review for the New York Times Francine Prose remarked that a writer of Ellis's subtlety, elegance, and wit could stand no chance in American publishing.

Whatever the reason for her neglect in this country, Ellis deserves much better. In her fiction the polemicist gives way to the artist, and a novelist of rare gifts emerges. She wrote her first novel, The Sin Eater (1977), because "novels give better scope for ungoverned rage than more sober works and I had to do something rather than sink into despair," she recalls in Serpent on the Rock: A Personal View of Christianity (1994). Yet Rose, Ellis's incisive, serenely confident mouthpiece, proves such a wholly individualized creation, as do the other characters in the book, that the result transcends any tractlike tendencies that might have lurked in its inception. In eleven works of fiction that followed The Sin Eater, Ellis continued to imagine complex characters who sprinkle her opinions into mixtures of keen analysis and tart dialogue.

From 1987 to 1989 Ellis published three novellas—The Clothes in the Wardrobe, The Skeleton in the Cupboard, and The Fly in the Ointment—that became known as the Summer House Trilogy. Although a bbc film version appeared as The Summer House and Penguin produced a one-volume movie tie-in edition under the same title, Ellis originally published the novellas as three separate Duckworth volumes. The New Testament Gospels inevitably come to mind: the novellas, each narrated by a different female character, all tell the same story while standing on their own to offer contrasting emphases and personal styles. Like the Gospels the three versions can be read as complementing one another, each novella indispensable as a gloss on the others, each contributing to a larger overall meaning. And, like the Gospel writers, Ellis tells a story of captivity and deliverance. But, if the Summer House Trilogy is a Christian allegory, it hardly conforms to doctrinaire expectations; nor is it the kind of redemption story one might have expected from a Catholic columnist once fired for her conservative views.

The Clothes in the Wardrobe introduces Margaret, a young woman engaged to a man she can't stand. Living in a London suburb with her divorced, fiercely conventional mother, Monica, Margaret mopes through the days until she must marry Syl, a grotesquely unappealing neighbor and family friend who is close to Margaret's mother in age. Margaret bickers with Monica, sits in the backyard summer house and reads, endures wedding-dress fittings, and drinks too much. On most occasions she acquiesces to her mother's wishes, just as she acquiesced when Syl, "flushed with wine, remarked that he thought it would be a good idea if we got married."

Something is clearly wrong with Margaret, something bigger than her problem with Syl. Gradually, in her flat, almost affectless tone, she reveals that during a recent stay...