Alice Thomas Ellis, the novelist and columnist who died on Tuesday aged 72, wrote dryly ironic and acutely perceptive domestic tales which drew on her own family life and her devout Roman Catholicism, and evoked comparisons with Muriel Spark.

In novels such as “The Sin Eater,” “The 27th Kingdom” and “The Clothes in the Wardrobe,” she was entertaining and thought-provoking about matters of the soul; and though there was never very much in the way of a plot, her emotional honesty, piercing wit, and the effortless elegance of her prose sustained the reader’s interest throughout.

Instantly recognizable with her kohlrimmed eyes, Ellis was a prodigious worker who fought against many setbacks, including the deaths of two children, one a son who died at age 19 when he fell through a roof.

She wrote some 21 novels and nonfiction books as well as pithy journalism. Alice Thomas Ellis was in fact a pen name. Her real name was Anna Haycraft and in her novels, so in real life: the Haycrafts inhabited a bustling world of domestic chaos, and in her journalism tales of domestic crises were interspersed with trenchant snippets of advice. Do not buy “teen fiction” for your adolescent children, she wrote on one occasion: “They are narcissistic enough and should be encouraged to snap out of it. Make them read “Crime and Punishment” and dock their pocket money if you catch them reading tripe.”

Her most constant target was the Roman Catholic Church, to which she had converted in her teens. In one of many paradoxes in her life, she combined a high degree of tolerance for family muddle with a stern demand for an ordered Church. Continuing the paradox, she combined her fervent traditionalism and love of ritual.

She did not confine her efforts to fiction. In her bitterly polemical “Serpent on the Rock: A Personal View of Christianity” (1994), she declared that the Second Vatican Council had unleashed a “tide of sewage,” and lashed out at guitars and ecumenical priests – all the “Protestantised happy-clappy stuff” which would end in the “triumph of Chaos and old night.”

An only child, she was born Anna Margaret Lindholm in Liverpool on September 9, 1932. She reacted strongly against her parents’ humanitarian beliefs and became a Catholic at 19, because she “no longer found it possible to disbelieve in God.” She spent six months as a postulant nun with the Order of Notre Dame, thinking it “the quickest way to God,” but left after slipping a disc. The nuns refused to take anybody with an incurable disorder. It was a huge disappointment.

Still pondering joining the more reclusive Carmelites, she moved to London to live with friends and took a job in a delicatessen. It was here that she met her future husband, Colin Haycraft, an up-and-coming publisher who had come in to buy an apple pie. She sold him a meat pie by mistake and he fell in love over a plate of steak and kidney.

They married in 1956 , and started a family that would eventually run to seven children. Close neighbors included Jonathan Miller, Michael Frayn and Claire Tomalin – and the Haycrafts’ London abode became the epicenter of a thriving bohemian cultural scene.

“The Sin Eater,” published when she was 45, was followed by “The Birds of the Air” (1980) and “The 27th Kingdom” (1982), which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Novels thereafter appeared almost annually. She also wrote a volume of memoirs, “A Welsh Childhood” (1990), and two books on cookery.

Ellis was engagingly modest about her writing. “I’ve just reread some of my own novels (which are being reprinted),” she reported in 2004, “and would rather read Vanity Fair three times over than submit myself to that trauma again.”

In later life, she and her husband founded an arts center at their ramshackle old farmhouse in Wales, where they offered residential writing courses as notorious for their gustatory opulence as their productivity.

After Colin Haycraft’s sudden death from a stroke in 1995, friends reported that she was stricken by grief, but her own memories were typically matter of fact: “I forget now when it was that Colin died of a stroke,” she wrote last year. “We had been married some 40 years but I didn’t miss him at all. The marriage was unimportant to me because the children were everything. He was just sort of there and after he died it didn’t seem that he was particularly further away. There was no anguish; it was more ‘you go first and I’ll catch up later’.”

When she was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2003, she felt no fear, but rather “huge excitement.” Surgery reprieved her for a time – much to her disgust: “The plane went off without me. I still have forms to fill in, the Inland Revenue to cope with, and it is so irritating.”