Rosemary Haughton obituary

My mother, Rosemary Haughton, who has died aged 97, first started writing in order to supplement my father Algy’s salary as a teacher at Ampleforth college, the Catholic boys’ boarding school in North Yorkshire. She found she had a great deal to say on Catholic culture, feminist spirituality, marriage and sexuality, and soon she also had a wide and very interested audience.

As well as writing more than 35 books, from her late 20s onwards she went on lecture tours in the UK, Europe and North America, all while raising her 12 children and working with Algy on Ampleforth school plays, including his final production, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which starred Rupert Everett as Titania, with walk-ons by my sister Emma and me.

Rosemary had an unconventional childhood. She was born in London, the eldest of the three daughters of Sylvia Thompson, a popular novelist, who came from a secular Jewish family, and Peter Luling, an artist of rather grand American origins. The family moved around a great deal, especially during the second world war, living high or low depending on book sales. Sylvia was often absent, and so Rosemary and her two sisters, Elizabeth and Virginia, were partly brought up by their grandmother Ethel, known as Gigi, who was one of the most loved and influential people in Rosemary’s life.

Her education was patchy during the war, but in her early teens she attended the Slade School of Art in London, where she developed her distinctive style of drawing. At about the age of 16 she became increasingly attracted to encountering God in and through “the Catholic thing”, as she described it, and she converted under the instruction of a Benedictine nun, Mother Raphael. Rosemary adopted her new religion with great seriousness and passion, although she did not take long to start to question the patriarchal structure and the “obsession of the Vatican with the need to control and regiment all forms of religious expression, but especially women’s”.

In 1948 she married Algy Haughton, also a Catholic convert – their 12 children included two sets of twins and two foster children.

When engaged in her writing, she would curl up on the sofa, one leg tucked under her, ballpoint pen in hand and a foolscap pad on her lap, scribbling, endlessly. She was lost to us noisy children, immune to our calls, arguments and demands, unless blood or vomit was involved, as it quite often was.

Rosemary created beautiful and productive gardens wherever she lived – in Yorkshire to help feed the family, and then to feed the two communities she helped establish, the first in 1974 in Scotland, a therapeutic centre now known as Lothlorien Rokpa, and later one in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Wellspring House , a centre of radical hospitality, in 1981 with a community of friends. Finally came a beautiful cottage garden in her home in Heptonstall, in the Yorkshire Dales.

Algy died in 2008, by which time Rosemary had already moved to Massachusetts, and in 2011 she and Nancy Schwoyer, one of the co-founders of Wellspring, became civil partners, moving back to the UK and living together in Heptonstall.

Rosemary was a radical and deep thinker; she was also creative, practical, kind, shy and loving. After a bout of illness she died peacefully at homehaving noted, with her customary curiosity: “I’m dying … I’ve never done that before.”

She is survived by Nancy and by her children – Susanna, twins Benet and Barny, Dominic, twins Andrew and Mark, David, Audrey, Philip, Luke, Emma and me – and 62 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.