Joan Aiken

Joan Aiken: The England That Never Happened

In her England, James II was never deposed, a King James III sits on the throne in the early nineteenth century, a Channel tunnel has been dug a hundred years ahead of schedule, and wolves are pouring through it out of Europe and Russia into the snowbound countryside. Joan Aiken spent several years writing the book that established this world, with a seven-year interruption while she worked full time to support two children after her husband's death. When *The Wolves of Willoughby Chase* appeared in 1962 it succeeded well enough that she never had to work for anyone else again — and she went on to publish more than a hundred books.

Rye, and Conrad Aiken's Daughter

Joan Delano Aiken was born on 4 September 1924 in Mermaid Street, Rye, East Sussex. Her father was Conrad Aiken, the American poet who would win a Pulitzer Prize; her mother, Jessie MacDonald, was Canadian-born and a Radcliffe graduate. Her parents' marriage ended, and in 1930 Jessie married the writer Martin Armstrong. Both of Joan's siblings wrote too: her sister Jane Aiken Hodge became a writer, her brother John a writer and research chemist.

This is a formidable literary household to be born into, and Aiken's education was correspondingly unorthodox. Her mother taught her at home until she was twelve. She then attended Wychwood School for girls in North Oxford from 1936 to 1940 and never went to university. Whatever she knew about how sentences work, she got from reading and from the people at the dinner table.

A Novel at Sixteen

She was precocious in the way that only children raised among writers tend to be. The BBC broadcast a children's story of hers on *Children's Hour* in 1941, when she was sixteen or seventeen; she had already completed a full-length novel by sixteen, and sold her first adult short story at seventeen.

Then life intervened. From 1943 to 1949 she worked at the United Nations Information Centre in London, where she met the journalist Ronald George Brown; they married in September 1945 and had two children. Brown died in 1955, leaving her a widow in her early thirties with a family to keep.

Argosy

She took an editorial job at *Argosy* magazine, and in the margins of paid work she assembled the beginnings of a career: two children's story collections, and the manuscript then called "Bonnie Green" that would become *The Wolves of Willoughby Chase*. It is worth dwelling on the arithmetic. The book that founded her reputation was written in fragments over years, around a full-time job and single parenthood, and it did not stop for the seven years when there was no time at all.

By the early 1960s she was writing full time from home, at a rate of two or three books a year, and she kept that up for four decades.

The Wolves Chronicles

*The Wolves of Willoughby Chase* sends the cousins Bonnie and Sylvia, with their friend Simon the goose-boy, against a governess named Miss Slighcarp and Mrs Brisket, who runs a cruel orphanage. The critic John Rowe Townsend summed it up as "a tale of double-dyed villainy, with right triumphant in the end" — which is accurate and does not begin to convey the pleasure of the prose, a mock-Victorian idiom Aiken handles with such confidence that the jokes and the terror arrive in the same sentence.

She kept returning to the world for the rest of her life. *Black Hearts in Battersea* (1964), *Nightbirds on Nantucket* (1966), *The Whispering Mountain* (1968), *The Cuckoo Tree* (1971), *The Stolen Lake* (1981), *Dido and Pa* (1986), *Is* (1992), *Cold Shoulder Road* (1995), *Limbo Lodge* (1999), *Midwinter Nightingale* (2003) and the posthumous *The Witch of Clatteringshaws* (2005) fill out an alternate Britain complete with its own London geography, including a Canal District that exists nowhere on any real map.

Its greatest inhabitant arrived by accident. Dido Twite, a scruffy, obstinate, entirely unsentimental London child, was a minor figure in *Black Hearts in Battersea* who proceeded to take over the series and much of Aiken's career.

Beyond the Wolves

The range beyond the Chronicles is startling. There was *Midnight Is a Place* (1976); the trilogy of *Go Saddle the Sea* (1978), *Bridle the Wind* (1983) and *The Teeth of the Gale* (1988); the Arabel and Mortimer books (1972–1995), illustrated by Quentin Blake, featuring a raven. She was a lifelong devotee of ghost stories — M. R. James, Fitz James O'Brien, Nugent Barker — and wrote her own in collections including *The Windscreen Weepers* (1969), *The Shadow Guests* (1980) and *A Whisper in the Night* (1982), plus *The Haunting of Lamb House*, a ghost story about the Rye house where Henry James and E. F. Benson both lived. She also wrote six Jane Austen continuations, among them *Mansfield Revisited* (1984), *Jane Fairfax* (1990) and *Eliza's Daughter* (1994), and published short stories under the pen name Nicholas Dee.

The prizes came steadily: the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize in 1969 for *The Whispering Mountain*, which had been commended for the Carnegie Medal the year before; the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Juvenile in 1972 for *Night Fall*. Jan Pieńkowski won the Greenaway Medal in 1971 for illustrating her retold fairy tales in *The Kingdom Under the Sea*. She was appointed MBE in 1999 for services to children's literature. *The Wolves of Willoughby Chase* was filmed in 1989 with Stephanie Beacham and Geraldine James; *Black Hearts in Battersea* reached television in 1995.

She married the New York landscape painter Julius Goldstein in 1976 and divided her time between his city and the Hermitage, her house in Petworth, Sussex. He died in 2001. Aiken died at home on 4 January 2004, aged seventy-nine.

Why Joan Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Aiken for a reason that can be stated exactly: she invented a self-consistent counterfactual England and maintained it, before the most literal-minded audience alive, across twelve books and forty-one years. Children notice contradictions. Aiken's alternate Britain — Stuart succession, premature Channel tunnel, wolves, a canal district in a London that never had one — holds together not because it is elaborately explained but because it is never explained at all. She wrote it as though it were simply the case, and the reader's imagination does the rest. That confidence is the whole trick.

Add a prose gift that carries mock-Victorian comedy and genuine dread in the same paragraph, and a rate of invention — over a hundred books, two or three a year for four decades — closer to a natural spring than a working method.

The honest counter-case follows directly from that speed. Nobody produces a hundred books without filler, and the Austen sequels are by design derivative, competent extensions of somebody else's imagination. Her honours are children's-book prizes, a genre award and an MBE; the literary establishment that garlanded her father with a Pulitzer never seriously considered her for its own laurels, and no major critic in the record calls her a genius. Her influence on the alternate-history novel is real but largely unacknowledged, in part because she wrote for children. The case for Aiken rests on fertility and world-building nerve rather than on any single unimprovable book.

Legacy

Aiken made an England that never existed feel more solid than most novelists manage with the real one, and she did it while raising two children on her own and writing at a pace that would break most careers. Dido Twite remains one of the great child heroines in English fiction — filthy, funny and unimpressed by everybody — and the Wolves Chronicles are still in print, still frightening, still funny. Sixty years on, the wolves have not gone away.

Achievements

• Member of the Order of the British Empire
• Notable work: The Wolves of Willoughby Chase