Rachel Ingalls


Rachel Holmes Ingalls was an American-born author who had lived in the United Kingdom from 1965 onwards. 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.
Ingalls's short story "Last Act: The Madhouse" inspired the story of the character Jean in the 1997 film Chinese Box by Wayne Wang.

Personal life

Ingalls was born on May 13, 1940, in Boston and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts where her father was a professor at Harvard. She received her B. A. degree from Radcliffe College in 1964, and immigrated to England. She is the daughter of Phyllis and the late Sanskritist Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls, Sr., and the sister of the computer scientist Dan Ingalls.

Literary reputation

Ingalls' reputation is characterised by deep admiration and acclaim but also a certain degree of obscurity. She has 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. She was awarded the Authors' Club First Novel Award for her book Theft. 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. Earlier praise for Mrs Caliban'' came from John Updike. The writer Daniel Handler is an advocate of Ingalls' work.