Rachel Ingalls

Rachel Holmes Ingalls (13 May 1940 – 6 March 2019)^[1] was an American-born author who had lived in the United Kingdom from 1965 onwards.^[2][3] She won the 1970 Authors' Club First Novel Award for Theft. Her novella Mrs. Caliban was published in 1982, and her book of short stories Times Like These in 2005.

Rachel Ingalls
Born	Rachel Holmes Ingalls (1940-05-13)13 May 1940 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	6 March 2019(2019-03-06) (aged 78) London, England
Occupation	Novelist
Education	Radcliffe College (BA)
Period	1970–2019
Notable works	Mrs. Caliban

Ingalls's short story "Last Act: The Madhouse" inspired the story of the character Jean in the 1997 film Chinese Box by Wayne Wang.^[4]

Biography

Ingalls was born on 13 May 1940, in Boston and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts where her father was a professor at Harvard.^[5] She received her B. A. degree from Radcliffe College in 1964, and immigrated to England.^[3]

She was the daughter of Phyllis (née Day) and the late Sanskritist Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls, Sr., and the sister of the computer scientist Dan Ingalls.^[6][7]

Ingalls died from multiple myeloma under hospice care in London on 6 March 2019, at age 78.^[1]

Literary reputation

Ingalls' reputation is characterised by deep admiration and acclaim but also a certain degree of obscurity.^[8] She referred to her limited commercial success as being due to the ''very odd, unsalable length" of her books, which tend to be story collections or novellas.^[9] She was awarded the Authors' Club First Novel Award for her book Theft.^[10] In 1986 the British Book Marketing Council named the hitherto little known Mrs Caliban as one of the 20 greatest American novels since World War II, sparking wider interest in both book and writer.^[9] Earlier praise for Mrs Caliban came from John Updike.^[11] The writer Daniel Handler is an advocate of Ingalls' work.^[12][13] In an overview of her work written for Book Post, Joy Williams wrote, "[Ingalls] had a keen sense of the unrealness of people and event, the questionableness at the heart of the world."^[14]

Bibliography

• Theft (1970). London: Faber. ISBN 9780571139910
• The Man Who Was Left Behind and Other Stories (1974). London: Faber. ISBN 0571104800
• Mrs. Caliban (1982). London: Faber. ISBN 0571118267
• Binstead's Safari (1983). London: Dent. ISBN 0460022512
• Three of a Kind (1985). London: Faber. ISBN 0571136060
• The Pearlkillers (1986). London: Faber. ISBN 0571137954
• The End of Tragedy (1987). London: Faber. ISBN 0571148409
• Four Stories (1987). London: Faber. ISBN 0571145469
• Days Like Today (2000). London: Faber. ISBN 0571201105
• Times Like These (2005). Saint Paul, Minn: Graywolf Press. ISBN 9781555974312
• Black Diamond (2013). London: Faber and Faber. ISBN 9780571300112
• In the act, New York : New Directions Publishing, 2023, ISBN 978-0-8112-3204-3
• No love lost, selected novellas; with a foreword by Patricia Lockwood, London : Faber & Faber, 2023, ISBN 978-0-571-37658-2

In 2017 Pharos Editions published a collection of Ingalls' stories selected and introduced by Daniel Handler under the title Three Masquerades: Novellas (ISBN 9781940436449).^[15]