Macabre allegories: No Love Lost, by Rachel Ingalls, reviewed

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.