Alice Thomas Ellis, 72, the English author of wry and searching novels about domestic life including "The Sin Eater" and "The Clothes in the Wardrobe," died March 8, it was reported in London. She had lung cancer.
Ms. Thomas Ellis drew on her personal tragedy, including the deaths of two of her seven children, and on her strong Roman Catholic faith to produce 21 witty, thought-provoking novels and works of nonfiction.
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She also wrote the "Home Life" column for the Spectator magazine and a traditionalist column in the Catholic Herald, which she used to attack bishops until she was fired in 1996 for accusing Liverpool's archbishop at the time, Derek Worlock, of watering down the faith.
Born Anna Margaret Lindholm in Liverpool, northern England, Ms. Thomas Ellis became Catholic at the age of 19 because, she said, she "no longer found it possible to disbelieve in God."
She spent six months as a postulant nun with the Order of Notre Dame but left after slipping a disk in her spine, because the nuns refused to accept people with incurable problems.
She moved to London, where she married publisher Colin Haycraft. In 1968, Haycraft became managing director of the publisher Duckworth's, and his wife became his fiction editor; writers she discovered included Beryl Bainbridge and Penelope Fitzgerald.
She started her own writing in 1977, assuming the pen name Alice Thomas Ellis.
Her first novel, "The Sin Eater," published the same year, inveighs against the Catholic Church's attempts to update its presentation.
It was a theme she was to explore often; in "Serpent on the Rock: A Personal View of Christianity" (1994), she accused the Second Vatican Council of producing a "tide of sewage" including ecumenical priests, guitars and other "Protestantized happy-clappy stuff."
Ms. Thomas Ellis's other novels include "Birds of the Air" (1980), "The 27th Kingdom" (1982), "Unexplained Laughter" (1985), "Pillars of Gold" (1992) and "Fairy Tale" (1994).
Her 1990 work, "The Inn at the Edge of the World," won a Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award.
In their later years, Ms. Thomas Ellis and her husband founded an arts center at their Welsh farmhouse, offering residential writing courses.
Usually dressed in black, she was instantly recognizable with her eyes outlined with kohl.
Her husband died in 1995. Survivors include four sons and a daughter.
