Rachel Ingalls, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 78, was a writer who did not seek out the spotlight, but found it not at all unpleasant when at last it came. Beyond a small circle of loyal friends and regular visits to Virginia to see her family, Ingalls lived a fairly reclusive existence after her move from the U.S. to the U.K. in 1965. “I'm not exactly a hermit,” she said, “but I'm really no good at meeting lots of strangers and I'd resent being set up as the new arrival in the zoo. It's just that that whole clubby thing sort of gives me the creeps.”
A writer of fantastical yet slight works of fiction, with a back catalog numbering 11 titles in total, Ingalls flew more or less under the literary radar until recent years, when the newfound interest that followed the 2017 re-issue of her best-known book, Mrs. Caliban, also finally allowed her readers to learn about her processes and motivations; the attention slowly brought her into the public eye. Reviews across the board revered the oddly taciturn novella, in which mythic elements and extraordinary happenings are introduced into the lives of otherwise normal people by a prose remarkable for its clarity and quickness. “Ingalls writes fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness.” Wrote Lidija Haas in The New Yorker; in the same piece she described Ingalls as “unjustly neglected.” (Mrs. Caliban was also lightheartedly celebrated as a venerable addition to popular culture's mysterious year of fish sex stories, a fittingly strange introduction of her work to a broader readership.)
Ingalls passed away from myeloma, a cancer of the blood, on March 6th of this year, a few weeks after New Directions re-released a second of her novels, Binstead's Safari, under their imprint.
Hugh Fleetwood, her friend and fellow author, said of her reaction to the rising recent interest in her work, “She seemed to be not merely happy, but — like Violetta in the final scene of her favorite opera, ‘La Traviata' — reborn.” Ingalls was a lover of the opera, theater, and films. She sometimes said her largest literary influences were Henrik Ibsen and William Shakespeare. Other times, she said her literary influences were anything she had read. When asked what advice she would give writers, she recommended they “go to literary sources which are not books, such as film and theater, and anything else which deals with the same themes as books.” Given her passion for cinema, it is of no surprise that her writing has a filmic quality; her novel Mrs. Caliban has been the subject of several attempted film adaptations, none of which have made it to production.
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