Their son Joshua spent ten months in a coma after falling off a roof, dying at age 19 in 1978.
[2] The author Clare Colvin, in Ellis's obituary in The Guardian, described her skills as an editor:[2]She combined a novelist's imagination with an editor's forensic skills, getting immediately to the heart of the problem, with an observation such as, "Lovely characters, darling, but where's the plot?
"[2] Her first novel, The Sin Eater (1977) appeared under the pseudonym Alice Thomas Ellis, which she used in all her later writing.
In a New York Times article, Margalit Fox described her work:Shot through with melancholy, Ms. Ellis's novels focus on the small savageries, deep discontents and abiding grief of women's lives.
[4] Ellis's cookery books include All-natural Baby Food (Fontana/Collins, 1977) and Darling, you shouldn't have gone to so much trouble, co-written with Caroline Blackwood.
As a conservative Roman Catholic, Ellis disliked the Second Vatican Council changes in church practices.
She claimed that since the change from the Tridentine Mass, she could barely bring herself to attend church on Sundays.
As a regular columnist of the Catholic Herald newspaper, Ellis in 1996 criticised Derek Worlock, the former Archbishop of Liverpool, shortly after his death, accusing him of responsibility for a strong fall in church attendance in the previous decade.
Infuriated by her comments, Cardinal Hume pressed the Catholic Herald to restrict her columns to cookery.