At the time of her death in 2019, Rachel Ingalls was, according to loved ones, at last starting to delight in her embrace by the literary world. “She was so happy,” her sister, Sarah Daughn, told the New York Times; it was as if Ingalls finally “felt she was getting to say everything she wanted to say.” The author and painter Hugh Fleetwood likened her to Violetta in the final scene of Ingalls’s favorite opera, La Traviata: “She seemed to be not merely happy, but . . . reborn.”
That her life began to blossom in the wake of a terminal diagnosis (Ingalls died of myeloma, a cancer of the blood) is a peculiar narrative turn, not least because it’s a fate she might have bestowed on one of her female characters. Overlooked or underloved women—mainly wives and mothers, quietly asphyxiating beneath the bell jar of feminine acculturation—form the emotional nucleus of many of her stories. What typically follows is an uncanny disturbance: the arrival of a monstrous creature or event, tossing the sedate lives of unremarkably unhappy heterosexuals into utter chaos. While such disorder provisionally lifts Ingalls’s heroines into a liberatory space, their outcome is rarely utopian. Don’t be surprised when the bodies start piling up.
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