Alice doesn’t live here any more

Alice Thomas Ellis, the novelist and former Spectator columnist who died last week, once took part in an earnest feminist questionnaire that asked her to name the most important event in women’s history.

‘The Annunciation,’ she replied.

Alice — known to all her friends by her real name, Anna — bore the physical aspect of a sensitive north London novelist: her huge, panda eyes were pools of compassion, framed by wispy hair and hand-made earrings. When people discovered that she was a Catholic — indeed, that it was the most important thing in her life — they sometimes assumed that she belonged to the Church’s ‘justice ’n’ peace’ brigade and subscribed to the Tablet, an archly progressive Catholic magazine.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. ‘I sometimes think that the Devil lives in Islington and reads the Tablet,’ she announced shortly before she died. ‘But I may be doing him an injustice.’