Joan Aiken, b.September 4, 1924, d.January 4, 2004.
She was the daughter of American poet, Conrad Aiken, and her mother was Canadian, later married to yet another famous writer, Martin Armstrong. Her older sister was also an author, so the writing gene seems to have run in the family.
Joan Aiken was homeschooled by her mother until she was twelve years old. Then, she attended a girls’ school for about four years, and then she began to write. She finished her first full-length novel when she was sixteen. She never attended university. She published over a hundred books in many different genres. Homeschool success story, anyone?
Her books are quite well-written, intriguing, and imaginative. The children’s books that she is most famous for, the Wolves Chronicles, are not going to be to everyone’s taste. They’re rather Dickensian, alternate history, with a touch of Edgar Allan Poe.
Take, for instance, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. It’s creepy and perilous. It’s set in a sort of alternate Georgian England in which there are dangerous wolves everywhere, and everyone knows how to shoot them for self-protection, even children. Add in a villainous governess, a duplicitous lawyer, an orphan sent to a Dickensian school, and a ship lost at sea, and you’ve got Gothic for children. Just scary enough to be fun, but everything works out in the end. The other books in the series are Black Hearts in Battersea (1964), Nightbirds on Nantucket (1966), The Whispering Mountain (1968), The Stolen Lake (1981), Dangerous Games (1999), The Cuckoo Tree (1971), Dido and Pa (1986), Is Underground (1992), Cold Shoulder Road (1995), Midwinter Nightingale (2003), and The Witch of Clatteringshaws (2005).
Then, there’s second series for children, the Arabel and Mortimer books, which begins with Arabel’s Raven and continues on with twelve more volumes. (Ms. Aiken was obviously a fan of long series of books with the same fantastic setting.) I’ll read that one someday, after I finish all of the Wolves Chronicles.
Ms. Aiken was also a Janeite, and she wrote several books that were sequels to or take-offs on Jane Austen’s novels. I’d like to read one of those one day.
More about Joan Aiken:
Happy Birthday, Celebrating Joan Aiken.
Review of Mansfield Park Revisited by Joan Aiken at the blog Diary of an Eccentric.
Joan Aiken’s website.