There was once a poor widow with two young children who wrote to her agent to ask what had happened to the novel she had sent him. Her husband had died, leaving nothing but debts, and matters were becoming desperate. However, she was not quite the usual aspiring author: for one thing, she was the daughter of a Pulitzer prize-winning poet; for another, she had already published two collections of short stories.
It turned out that her agent had forgotten all about it. Her manuscript had been sitting on the windowsill in his office for a year, unread.
That manuscript was The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Its rapturous reception when it was published in 1962 turned its 38-year-old author, Joan Aiken, into one of the most beloved writers of all time. This year marks the centenary of her birth, and if ever there is a time to discover her more than 100 books for children and adults, it is now.
Joan Aiken was the daughter of American and Canadian parents, whose gifts, passions and tragedy she was to revisit over and over in her brilliantly imaginative fiction. Conrad Aiken was a poet of the 1920s; while attending Harvard with TS Eliot (he gave Ezra Pound a copy of Prufrock), he met his wife, Jessie McDonald, a beautiful Radcliffe graduate, and married her when she was just 18. They moved with their son and daughter to Rye in Sussex, where Joan was born in 1924, until Conrad’s numerous infidelities and absences caused Jessie to divorce him in 1929.
Conrad did not have much of a relationship with his youngest daughter for the first few years of her life. It was Jessie, left with very little money in a foreign country, who poured her knowledge of literature, folk songs, history, cooking and geography into Joan, whom she taught at home. (Joan’s elder sister, Jane, became a prolific writer of detective fiction and historical romances. Her brother John became a scientist.) When Jessie married one of Conrad’s friends, Martin Armstrong, a poet who worked for the BBC Children’s Hour, his Sussex home became a happy base for the family.
At 12, Joan was sent to an Oxfordshire boarding school where she was initially extremely unhappy. Despite being the tallest in her year on arrival, she stopped growing, remaining just under 5ft. (Her heroes and heroines always tend to be on the small side.) She also began to go deaf.
A blissful childhood followed by misery at school is a familiar feature of many authors’ lives, and Aiken’s debut novel plays on those extreme contrasts. Willoughby Chase in Yorkshire is “a warm and welcoming stronghold” in a dark, wintry and wolf-harrowed landscape. Her two heroines, cousins Bonnie and Sylvia, are also opposites: Bonnie is wealthy, impatient and spirited, whereas Sylvia is poor and timid. Yet they become fast friends; and it’s just as well they do because the governess appointed to care for them turns out to be pure evil.
No sooner have Bonnie’s parents departed for a warmer climate than the governess puts on Lady Green’s best gowns and jewels, forges a new will leaving Willoughby Chase to herself, and makes sure Bonnie’s parents die on their voyage. Cruel, imperious and grotesque, she rivals CS Lewis’s White Witch. “I’d like to see the wolf that would tackle me!” says Miss Slighcarp, and the story of how the two girls fight back has electrified readers ever since.
“My mother wanted to write stories that would give the same pleasure that she’d had as a child from the novels of Wilkie Collins, Dickens, the Brontës,” Joan’s daughter Lizza says.
Although Wolves was well received in the UK when it was published by Jonathan Cape in 1962, the real difference was its reception in the US. It helped that Conrad Aiken put Joan in touch with his New York agent, Charles Schlesinger, who adored the book’s humour and sophistication. Time magazine called it “a genuine small masterpiece”, and it became a bestseller, never out of print to this day and eventually filmed in 1989.
At 38, Joan had served a long apprenticeship. She had been a top student at school but failed to get into Oxford because of illness and the war. Instead, she got a job as a typist at the BBC, and then the United Nations Information Centre, where she fell in love with and married its press officer Ron Brown. When Brown turned out to have TB, he was promptly sacked, and the pair moved to Lewes, a town that became the setting for many of Joan’s short stories.
Her first collection, All You Ever Wanted, was published by Jonathan Cape in 1953, followed by More Than You Bargained For (1955). As money became tighter, she wrote a story every day for a week, and these fantastical, spooky and satirical tales have been repeatedly reissued (including most recently this year by Manderley Press as Tales of London Town). They were to influence distinguished writers on both sides of the Atlantic, from China Miéville to Philip Pullman and Kelly Link. Encouraged, Joan typed the first two chapters of a children’s novel, Bonnie Green. But in 1955, when her husband died, Joan became, like many of the heroines of her adult fiction, the sole support for two children, then aged three and five. She got a job in London at Argosy, a literary magazine that published authors such as HE Bates and Ray Bradbury, supplementing her meagre salary by contributing short stories, “having worked out the necessary combination of elements – exotic background, touch of sex, twist ending, touch of humour … that would make a story acceptable”.
After four years on the magazine, only seeing her children at weekends, she found a semi-derelict Tudor ex-pub in Petworth to live in, and started work in earnest on Bonnie Green.
This book became The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and by 1963 its international success meant that she could leave Argosy. She spent another year as a copywriter at J Walter Thompson (the inspiration for her delicious comedy thriller Trouble With Product X) before taking the plunge to write full-time. Wolves led to two further stories, Black Hearts in Battersea, this time starring Simon, the orphaned artist boy who helps Bonnie and Sylvia, and the cockney guttersnipe Dido, who, in Nightbirds on Nantucket, foils a Hanoverian plot to blow up St Paul’s Cathedral. The tomboyish, defiant Dido has a roughness that may seem familiar to fans of Philip Pullman’s Lyra. Nine more adventures followed, with the final volume, The Witch of Clatteringshaws, being published posthumously.
But Aiken’s output was prodigious and varied. She tended to alternate children’s books with adult ones. Her historical romances can rival those of Georgette Heyer (The Five-Minute Marriage especially). Her gothic thrillers are as shivery as Mary Stewart’s, and her Jane Austen “sequels”, such as Mansfield Revisited, have a pace, polish and love of Georgian language that charms even as she subverts expectations.
It is her children’s books that are most remembered, however, and each is a work of art. She collaborated with some of the greatest illustrators of the day – Jan Pieńkowski (A Necklace of Raindrops), Quentin Blake (The Winter Sleepwalker, out in a new Puffin edition for the centenary) and above all Pat Marriott (who illustrated the first Wolves books and also the Felix trilogy). Dido was one of the first working-class heroines, and action heroines, in British children’s literature. Darkness, injustice and cruelty underlie Aiken’s stories; packed with vivid characters, each can be read as a critique of capitalism, industrialisation and the class system. Her aristocrats are often villains of the deepest dye, never more so than in The Whispering Mountain (which won the 1969 Guardian award for children’s fiction) with its cold, murderous, gold-obsessed Marquess of Malyn, searching for a lost tribe of goldsmiths living inside a Welsh volcano.
Set against these are robustly resourceful, funny and kind protagonists, not unlike Aiken herself. Her second marriage, to the New York painter Julius Goldstein, was happy, and this contentment was evident in her later books.
At the heart of Aiken’s best work is her intense preoccupation with creativity. Stories such as A Harp of Fishbones and The Faithless Lollybird convey the joy of this gift, while also warning against overtaxing it. Several heroes and heroines are, like her father, poets, authors or musicians, and Aiken has no illusions as to how hard a vocation is to live with.
“My mother said Dido was driven to sort out the ills of the world,” says Lizza Aiken, who has become the keeper of her mother’s flame, persuading publishers to reissue her books and even publishing many of the gothic novels as ebooks. “She was a bit like that herself. Even when on her beam-ends, she wanted to help.”
• Tales of London Town by Joan Aiken is published by Manderley Press (£18.99). The Three Graces by Amanda Craig is published by Abacus (£9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copies at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
