ANNA HAYCRAFT began her life in London as a publisher’s wife, became the fiction editor in his publishing house and then turned herself into a successful novelist and columnist as Alice Thomas Ellis. She also became a controversial spokeswoman for traditional Roman Catholicism.

She was born in 1932, the daughter of John and Alexandra Lindholm. Her father was a Finn. She went to Bangor County Grammar School as an evacuee, and on to Liverpool School of Art after the war. In Liverpool, her life and loves overlapped considerably with those of Beryl Bainbridge, though neither realised it until she started publishing Bainbridge’s novels years later in London.

She converted to Catholicism in her late teens and spent six months as a postulant nun in a teaching order. But after suffering a severe slipped disc she felt that she could not go ahead with the active work the vocation would entail.

In 1956, when she was 24, she married Colin Haycraft. She had met him when she was working in a delicatessen in Chelsea and gave him a meat pie instead of an apple pie. They said he fell in love with her when he tasted steak and kidney with custard.

In 1968 Colin Haycraft joined the publishing house of Duckworth, and subsequently became its owner. They lived in a house in London NW1, where they were neighbours of Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Claire Tomalin and many other writers and artists who were or would become famous (and who were satirised in Mark Boxer’s cartoon strip, Life and Times in NW!, in The Listener).

The basement of the Haycrafts’ house became a notable literary gathering place, with its furniture acquired from the local junk shops, and Anna in those early days always smoking beside the stove, with a glass of wine on the table and her children running round. Parties there were memorable events, with Colin’s lethal champagne cocktails waiting at the door, and Lord Horder, another Duckworth director, carving the ham.

Colin Haycraft liked working at home, and though the Duckworth offices moved to an old piano factory just down the road, the company was really run from the Haycrafts’ house. From 1970, Anna was in charge of fiction, while Colin, who claimed to despise fiction, concerned himself with the scholarly and quirky books he adored publishing. Beryl Bainbridge was only the most notable of the many novelists whom Anna encouraged and published. She became a great friend of both the Haycrafts.

Anna had seven children (of whom two died young), and in 1977 she brought out a book called Natural Baby Food, written under her own name. In the same year she published her first novel, The Sin Eater, under the pseudonym Alice Thomas Ellis.

It was at once apparent that here was a novelist with a light and original touch. The Sin Eater was a witty book, but it also deftly introduced many powerful themes that were to run through her work: a strong Roman Catholic awareness of sin and death, a hatred of vulgarity, an admiration for spirited women and a scorn for pathetic men — all of this set in a small Welsh tourist resort.

Many other novels followed in the next 20 years. Jennifer Uglow, reviewing The Birds of the Air (1980) in the TLS, said that “beneath its elegant and often very funny surface” this story of Home Counties life was “almost overburdened by urgent blasts against modern society”. The Clothes in the Wardrobe (1987) was about an unhappy young Englishwoman in Croydon whose life is transformed by the arrival of Lili, a determined woman who scorns convention and turns looming tragedy into triumph — “wicked wit with the grace of an angel,” one reviewer said.

The novels were really, she once said, an attack on the Sixties: “I couldn’t stand all that sort of free love and drugs and beads and flowers and crap. All through the Sixties I wanted to get on a soap box and say ‘You’re all mad’.”

In 1985 she started writing a very successful column for The Spectator called “Home Life”. In a slightly false-naive tone, it recorded all the absurd but fascinating goings-on in the basement in Gloucester Crescent — from coping with exploding fridges to catching young burglars and giving them Marmite sandwiches. But readers could also detect a vein of sadness in the column. One newspaper interviewer called her “a paradox of sunniness and shadow”.

In fact after 1978 a deep shadow always hung over her life — the death of her son Joshua. He had been sitting on a wall overlooking the deep railway cutting outside Euston station, when his shoe fell on to a ledge below. He dropped down to the ledge to retrieve it and fell through. He lay in a coma in hospital, and Anna brought relay after relay of friends to talk to him in the hope that it might bring him back to consciousness, but after a year he died.

After The Spectator, she contributed a column to The Universe from 1989 to 1991, which was followed by a column in The Catholic Herald. By now she had become an implacable Catholic traditionalist, deploring the Second Vatican Council (which, she said, let in not a breath of fresh air but “a tide of sewage”), detesting ecumenism, appalled by abortion.

In 1996 she provoked an outcry when her Catholic Herald column attacked Derek Worlock, the Archbishop of Liverpool, soon after his death. For her, Worlock represented all that had gone wrong with the Catholic Church. As a reformist, he had acquiesced in the end of the Latin Mass, supported ecumenism by forming an alliance with David Sheppard, the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, and, as she saw it, opened the Church up to an invasion of banality and heresy. The Catholic Herald published a front-page apology for the column, but she later resumed writing for the paper.

Apart from her novels, she published a number of other books, including The Serpent on the Rock (1994), which also scourged Catholic liberalism, and collections of her Spectator and Catholic Herald pieces. With Caroline Blackwood she compiled a cookery book, Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone To So Much Trouble (1980). Caroline Blackwood and her husband, the American poet Robert Lowell, were often in and out of the house.

Colin Haycraft died in 1994, and although he would argue fiercely, if courteously, with her about her religious beliefs, she gave him a full-scale Catholic funeral.

In 2001 she sold the Gloucester Crescent house, and moved to a house she had bought in Wales. There was one last party behind the peeling, Georgian green windows of the famous basement before she left.

She is survived by four sons and one daughter.

Alice Thomas Ellis, novelist, was born on September 9, 1932. She died on March 8, 2005, aged 72.