Posted on March 20, 2019 at 12:00 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
Author Rachel Ingalls found some fleeting recognition in the 1980s, when her novel Mrs. Caliban landed on a list of best postwar American novels.
But it took nearly thirty years and a well-timed reissue of the book for her to return to the limelight.
Mrs. Caliban, you see, tells the story of a woman who welcomes a sea creature into her home ... and heart.
Sound like a certain best-picture-winning Hollywood film?
Yep, The Shape of Water — which resembled, but wasn't based on Mrs. Caliban — helped propel Ingalls back into the thick of the literary world.
Sadly, however, Ingalls didn’t have much time to enjoy the spotlight.
She passed away at age seventy-eight on March 6, not long after another of her novels, Binstead’s Safari, was re-released to more acclaim.
You can read the New York Times’s obituary of Ingalls, and we also recommend the Chicago Tribune’s appreciation of Ingalls.
Categories: Today in Books