Abstract

The disruption of a middle class complacency interlaced with subtle cruelties is at the heart of Alice Thomas Ellis’s fiction. To achieve this unseating of prescribed mores she appropriates, in several of her novels, supernatural elements of Celtic mythology. The final outcomes of Thomas Ellis’s tales do not invoke tragedy of a shocking nature. But they do induce fundamental change in individuals, and it is the conviction of this change - wrought by paranormal intervention - on which the success of the narratives depends. Why does the author deploy the supernatural to actuate a major shift in her characters’ view not only of their own lives, but of the ambient universe in which they exist? As a committed Catholic, does Thomas Ellis herself believe in the phenomenon of supernatural visitation? Moreover, manifestation of the supernatural in her work is facilitated by the world of nature. Do natural phenomena serve as a channel for divine expression? Despite her ironic – even facetious – tone at times, Thomas Ellis’s rendering of paranormal intercession is compellingly done. Does she, however, merely exploit the supernatural as a sly means of exposing her characters’ glibness, thereby bringing it to account? Alternatively, does the supernatural serve as a kind of disguise, a metaphor for the epiphany of divine intervention? In this paper I intend to examine Thomas Ellis’s use of the supernatural in all its facets in her work and to probe her possible motives for a seemingly serious engagement with what remain intangible phenomena in a world of increasing materialism and cynicism; and how, for all the apparent artifice and archness of her stories, the author might wish to engage with her readers in serious existential questions for the modern age.

Keywords: Celtic mythology, selkies, faeries, Catholicism, divinity, otherness, nature.

How to Cite:

Morgan-Jones, J., (2025) “Chaos in the Quotidian: Alice Thomas Ellis's Spirits of the Celtic Fringe”, International Journal of Welsh Writing in English 12(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16922/ijwwe.12.3