Rachel Ingalls might just be the best writer of the late 20th century you’ve never heard of. Born in Boston in 1940 (her father was a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard), Ingalls dropped out of school and studied in Germany before winning a place at Radcliffe College. Shakespeare’s quadricentennial drew her to London and in 1965 she came for good, living in north London until her death, aged 78, in 2019.
Ingalls has been praised by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Ursula K. Le Guin and Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket). Faber’s Charles Monteith described her as ‘a genius – not a word I use lightly’ and published her debut in 1970. John Updike called her novella Mrs Caliban ‘an impeccable parable’.
Why, after such praise, did Ingalls slip under the radar? She herself suggested it was the ‘very odd, unsalable length’ of her works. She wrote 11 short story collections and novellas, and supported herself by taking various jobs, including as ballet critic for Tatler. As if answering Ingalls’s prayers beyond the grave, here comes No Love Lost, in which Faber has put together eight of her novellas into a collection that leaves you both spellbound and sucker-punched.
These eclectic fables draw upon magic realism, science fiction, Grimms’ fairy tales, Ovid, the Gothic, psychoanalysis, religion, brutal realism and horror movies. Ingalls was ‘full of contradictions, which is what I loved about her’, her friend the painter and novelist Hugh Fleetwood told me. ‘She was incredibly fey but underneath there was vanadium steel.’
In the first story, ‘Blessed Art Thou’, Anselm, a young monk, is seduced by the angel Gabriel. The experience turns him into a woman (‘Love transformed me’) and he falls pregnant while in solitary confinement.
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