Home Life One

Home Life #1

by Alice Thomas Ellis

A collection of the author's weekly columns in which she airs her views on matters domestic of every variety, in town or in the country. She discusses the behaviour of children and animals, horticulture and neighbours to the ability of the domestic appliance to do its own thing

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Essays, British Literature

205 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Alice Thomas Ellis was short-listed for the Booker prize for The 27th Kingdom. She is the author of A Welsh Childhood (autobiography), Fairy Tale and several other novels including The Summerhouse Trilogy, made into a movie starring Jeanne Moreau and Joan Plowright.

Reviews

[Louise Culmer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alice Thomas Ellis was living in Camden town with her husband and large family when she wrote these entertaining articles for the Spectator in the 1980s. Whether she is writing about something relatively mundane, like frozen pipes, or something more unusual, like the seven year old burglar she once caught in her house who became a lifelong friend, she manages to make everything sound fascinating. she was a woman of strong opinions, and you may not agree with everything she says, but she is never dull.

[Marisa Crowley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dull and snooty, too much of her personal tastes and judgments. Good sense of humor saved it from a lower rating.

[Beth Bonini · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Independent’s obituary for Alice Thomas Ellis (Anna Haycraft) describes her as “novelist, columnist and mother superior of the ‘chattering classes’. That ‘mother superior’ bit neatly sums up various important aspects of her character: the fact that she was a staunch (if argumentative) Catholic, the fact that she was the mother of 7 children, and the fact that she mothered many writers in her role as literary editor for Duckworth publishers.

Some years ago I became aware of, and then passionately interested in, the Gloucester Crescent set of London intelligentsia who were neighbours and friends in Camden for a period that roughly spanned from the 1960s to early 2000s, but probably enjoyed its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. (I refer you to Gloucester Crescent, by William Miller; or Love, Nina, by Nina Stibbe, if you want to get the flavour of the place and the personalities who inhabited it.) Alice was right at its centre: “She positioned herself strategically in front of the AGA cooker, dispensing delicious food, sharp wit, encouragement and a lot of booze but always with kindness and generosity.” The idea of a neighbourhood full of writers, who gathered in the evenings to smoke, drink and gossip, and temporarily corral their free-range children, completely charms me. I’m also interested in a woman who was noted for both her hospitality and her sharp writing and editing skills.

My edition of Home Life was published in 1986 and features what is presumably the author’s (or a child’s) sketch of two cats on the cover. This is the first of what would be four collections of Ellis’s columns for The Spectator, and as the title suggests, they provide a glimpse into the domestic life of its author. Titles range from “Power of Speech” (one of my favourites) to “Bailiffs”, “Neighbours” and “Country Life”. There is quite a lot about the weather, animals, children and general domestic chaos, particularly when the author is at her country house in northern Wales, and most columns are a small stew about some kind of beef that Ellis has with life at that moment. Some of these topics are enduring and of universal interest: “Possessions are a terrible nuisance; if they’re nice they’re asking to be stolen, and whether they’re nice or not they gather dust or get lost.” And “There seems to be a lot of madness around at the moment.” And “The party wall is the Sarajevo of everyday life, giving rise to more ill-feeling than any other single item in the world.” But even if one enjoys her writing style, her rather waspish sense of humour and her range of topics, these essays aren’t meant to be much more than a few minutes of light reading. I don’t know if you get a proper sense of Ellis’s true self, but they will certainly enlighten you on the personality she created for public consumption.

I close with possibly her most famous quote:
“There is no reciprocity. Men love women, women love children; children love hamsters - it’s quite hopeless.”

[Tess · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just perfect. A woman who observes her environment and comments wih grace, wit and understated intelligence. I have raced through the chapters (columns for the spectator) and relished her humour and observations as an anecdote to the daily frustrations!

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Someone has been writing books about her family members, divulging various tics and foibles. Did they give permission for Someone else to spill all?

[Gillian Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting easy to read, it is of it's time but I found it entertaining

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 1985 Alice Thomas Ellis began producing a weekly column in the Spectator called Home Life. These short pieces were collected together in four volumes of which this is the first – and I really will have to collect the other three (not sure how easy they are to get hold of though). This book was an absolute joy – and I would happily have read on and on had there been more. These articles about the author’s own family life are full of fun, tongue-in-cheek observations and ruminations – a (not so) Provincial Lady of the 1980s perhaps. She is also very honest, blithely referring to visiting her son’s grave almost in passing – you begin to feel very much one of the crowd.

“I vividly recall an occasion when the oldest son was starting to crawl. We were sitting in a garden in the country with acres of velvet lawn and I picked him up and ran with him, dropped him on the touch line and flew back to sip a drink in comparative peace before he could get at me again. He came thundering over the lawn on his hands and knees and peed on Randolph Churchill who had ill-advisedly taken him on to his lap. I can’t imagine why. It was a most uncharacteristic gesture – on the part of R. Churchill, I mean, not of the son.”

Dividing her time between her family home in London and her holiday home in wales, Ellis writes about her home life, her life as a prolific writer is only referenced a few times. Her husband, five children, Janet who comes every day to help – the cats and all manner of domestic woes and disasters. Things we can all relate to on some level are at the heart of these pieces. There is I suppose a very slightly snobbish tone to some of her pieces – Alice Thomas Ellis is no doubt a product of her environment and circumstances, but she is warm, charming and very funny.

Full review: https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2018/...

[Trish King · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have only given this book 3 stars because it is not my sort of book. It is a collection of Ms. Ellis's columns and deals with the minutia of her daily life. If it's your thing then I expect it's a very good book, but it's not, as I said, my thing. A little bit boring.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Humorous, well written and interesting.