Joan Aiken writing at her very best was a perfect companion. Well travelled, cultured, with a wealth of personal experience, and the ability not just to tell a gripping story, but to draw the reader in to the very process of writing. What she loved was to hold her audience in a […]
This famously haunting picture, and its resonant title, which some have taken as the manifesto of the Spanish painter Goya, was the inspiration for Joan’s science fiction fantasy The Cockatrice Boys. Her magpie mind was constantly on the alert, moving between the news of the day, the scientific discoveries that were changing the world, […]
Russ Tunney, Artistic Director of The Nuffield Theatre and long time Aiken admirer has adapted and premiered a gloriously funny and faithful stage version of Joan Aiken’s classic children’s book The Wolves of Willoughby Chase which is just celebrating its 50th Anniversary. The adaptation is published today by Nick Hern Books in a practical edition […]
What if you could have ‘All You’ve Ever Wanted‘? Joan Aiken liked to imagine just this sort of dangerous wish going horribly wrong, and it became the title story of her first book. The wishes in question are not made by her sensible heroine, the ill-starred Matilda, an orphan of course, who is brought […]
With over one hundred books published in her lifetime, Joan Aiken has contributed so much to the lives of her readers that some characters have lived on as a part of their own history, like old friends. Everyone has that aha! moment as with the taste of Proust’s famous Madeleine, when they catch sight of […]
It would be perfect if Joan herself were here to write this blog – with her many years of experience from her own early days of struggle and rejection slips, with her wide reading and appreciation of all kinds of life and literature, and her great sympathy for fellow writers, she would have had […]
Creating her own period of alternate history gave Joan Aiken the freedom to exercise her endless imagination, but also provided her with the opportunity to use a variety of stored information from her wide ranging reading and her life-long fascination with all kinds of study. These elements, combined with an absolutely riotous ear for dialogue […]
One of the very worst things you can hear as a child coming home to find that your room has been ‘Spring Cleaned’ must be: “Oh you didn’t want that did you? I thought you’d finished with it.’ This was clearly a memory from Joan Aiken’s own childhood, and she turned it into one of [...]
This marvellous moment of realisation occurs to Mori, the heroine of Jo Walton’s Among Others but could be a life saving discovery for any lonely child – and every child is in danger of loneliness as soon as they start to wonder about the world they have been born into. Joan Aiken was a lonely [...]
Joan Aiken’s passion for history often led her to wonder ‘what if’ things had turned out differently. What if, for instance, Jane Austen’s early novel, originally entitled ‘Susan’ and sold to a publisher in 1803, and which then languished unpublished until she furiously bought it back for £10 thirteen years later, had in fact appeared, even maybe without the knowledge of its author, and had been in the pocket of a young nobleman who ran away to join the Peninsular wars in Spain at the beginning of the 19th century.
The young man falls in love, and marries an aristocratic Spanish girl who dies having his baby, and he watches over the boy, disguised as a groom until his own death, when he leaves a letter, and his treasured book to the boy, Felix Brooke, with a message telling him to seek out his long lost family in the city of Bath, England where the action of Austen’s novel takes place. For Joan Aiken imagines that this is in fact Jane Austen’s early novel, ‘Northanger Abbey’ which was written in the full enthusiasm and confidence of youth, and is a delightful parody of all the Gothic romances so popular at the time. It is also a description of an innocent abroad, a heroine with a head full of fantasy from reading too many novels, who finds herself alone in a dangerous world struggling to make sense of the behaviour of unscrupulous villains or apparently solicitous friends with nothing but the world of fiction to guide her. This is much the same world that the Spanish orphan, young Felix Brooke encounters, but in a truly wild and Gothic landscape with terrifying brigands and murderers, mountain tribesmen looking for a human sacrifice, pirates who specialise in the kidnap of children, with only the assistance of Austen’s novel to sustain and comfort him.
In Joan Aiken’s Go Saddle the Sea Felix is recounting his story:
“The book, Susan, was an odd tale about a young lady and her quest for a husband; to tell truth, I wondered what my father had seen in it, that he had even carried it with him into battle; I found it rather dull, but since it had been my father’s I kept it carefully (his bloodstains were on the cover).”
Later in his adventures, having escaped various perils by the skin of his teeth and the use of his not inconsiderable wits, Felix has time to look into the book again, and reconsiders:
“I had opened it at the place where Miss Susan, going to stay with her great friends in their abbey-residence, is terrified at night by a fearful storm and the discovery of a paper,hid in a closet in her bedroom, which she takes to be the confession of some wicked deed of blood – only to find, next day, that the mysterious paper is naught but a washing bill! For the first time, this struck me as very comical; yet, reading it through again, I could see that the writer had represented the poor young lady’s terrors very skilfully; just such a nightmarish terror had I felt myself among those unchancy people in that heathen village – and yet for all I knew, my fears were equally foolish and unfounded! I began to see that this was not such a simple tale as I had hitherto supposed, but must be attended to carefully; and I gave my father credit for better judgement than I had at first…wondering what kind of man my father had been..and hoping that some person in England would be able to tell me more about him.”
In an article for the Jane Austen Society, Joan Aiken describes with relish the content of Mrs. Radcliffe’s bestseller, The Mysteries of Udolpho, which Austen had gleefully satirised:
“If we take a look at the works of Mrs. Radcliffe, we can easily see what tempted the youthful Jane Austen to poke fun at them…[they were] enormous historical canvases splashed over with forests and beetling fortresses and dark crags in the Appennines. Mrs. Radcliffe went in for immense casts of characters on a positively Shakespearian scale (she was in fact much influenced by Shakespeare for whom she had great admiration); she had stabbings and shootings, suicides and assassinations; interspersed, for comic relief, by long scenes with garrulous Shakespearian-type servants; she had immensely complicated family relationships, long-lost relatives in every possible connection, suggestions of incest, mysterious resemblances, and, besides all this, a large number of startling, apparently supernatural occurrences..”
From this we can see that these writers had an equally powerful influence on Joan Aiken’s own work, and by setting her novel, Go Saddle the Sea in just such a rip roaring Gothic world of her own in 19th century Spain, and with a nod at Austen’s own parody, she could have the best of all worlds!
Go Saddle the Sea is the first of the three ‘Felix’ Novels just about to come out in gorgeous new editions in the UK
For more details about all three books visit the Joan Aiken page at Random House
or visit the Felix pages at The Wonderful World of Joan Aiken
More famous for munching up flights of stairs, and even escalators (where do you think the word ravenous comes from?) Mortimer the raven, best known as a hilarious troublemaker in Joan’s series of stories about the Jones family and beloved friend of Arabel, is surprisingly also a hero with teachers of reluctant readers. Here’s a letter from one of them, thank you, Anne!
”I had a class of 10 and 11 year olds, one of whom was having great difficulty in learning to read. Well, let’s be blunt about this, he couldn’t even read his name. He and I worked long and hard on this problem, mainly with the help of his brother’s motorbike manual, and eventually he began to make sense of the words on the page and I began to understand how to strip a bike engine. (All the best teaching goes two ways!) But, the day I knew he’d really made it as an independent reader was all down to Joan Aiken. Every afternoon in that class began with us all putting our feet up with a good book and reading silently for twenty minutes or so. (How else does a hard pressed teacher get time to read?) On this particular afternoon we were all well into our books when there comes a suppressed snigger from the general direction of this lad’s desk. I decide to ignore it. Then there is another, rather less well suppressed, and finally an outright chortle. He was almost unaware of what he was doing so engrossed was he in the book that he could now read well enough to really enjoy. And the book? Aiken’s ‘Arabel’s Raven’. I bless her regularly for turning him into a real reader.”
Read more about the Arabel and Mortimer stories here
and the TV series (as above) and watch a clip here with puppets based on the wonderful illustrations by Quentin Blake
Here is her letter:
If you were going to sail round the world alone in a small boat, and could take only one of these things to amuse you, which would you choose? A big iced cake, a beautiful picture, a book, a pack of cards, a paint box (and paper), a pair of knitting needles and wool, a musical box, a mouth organ…
It would be a hard choice. Myself, I wouldn’t want the cake. I’d eat it too fast. Nor the cards, they might blow away. Nor the wool, it might just get wet. The mouth organ would be better than the musical box, for one could make up one’s own tunes. I wouldn’t take the picture, for I could look at the sea. Nor the paint box, because in the end I’d use up all the paper. So the last choice would be between the mouth organ and the book. And I’m pretty sure I’d choose the book.
One book! I can hear someone say. But if you were sailing round the world, you’d have read it hundred times before the trip was over. You’d know it by heart.
And I’d answer yes, I might read it a hundred times, yes, I might know it by heart. That wouldn’t matter. You don’t refuse to see your friend, or your mother, or your brother, because you have met them before. You don’t leave home because you already know what’s there.
A book you love is like a friend. It is like home. You meet your friend a hundred times. On the hundred-and-first meeting you can still say, “Well, I never realized you knew that!’ You go home every day; after ten years you can still say “I never noticed how beautiful the light is when it shines on that corner.”
There is always something new to find in a book, however often you read it.
When you read a story you do something that no animal can, however well trained; only man can do it; you are stepping out of your mind into someone else’s. You are listening to the thoughts of another person. While doing this, you are making your own mind work. And making your own mind work is the most interesting thing there is to do.
So I’d sit my boat and read my book over and over. First I’d think about the people in the story, why they acted the way they did. Then I’d think about the words the writer used, why he chose them. Then I’d wonder why he wrote the story and how I’d have done it, if I’d written it. Then I might carry on the story in my mind, after the end of the book. Then I’d go back and read all my favourite bits and wonder why I liked them best. Then I’d read all the other bits and look for things that I hadn’t noticed before. Then I might make a list of the things I’d learned from the book. Then I’d try to imagine what the writer was like, from the way he’d written his story…
It would be like having another person in the boat.
A book you love is like a friend, it’s like a familiar place where you can go when you choose. It’s something of your very own, for no two people read the same book in quite the same way.
If every single person in the world had a book – just one book – and they’d have to be able to read it of course, we’d have a lot less trouble.
Just one book apiece. That shouldn’t be too hard to manage?
How shall we start?
A letter from Joan Aiken for International Children’s Book Day, 1974
Joan Aiken took her characters very much to heart, rather like her favourite predecessor, Jane Austen, and it could be said that for both writers their heroines had a life outside their books as well. It is easy to forget that before Jane Austen, literary heroines were rather one dimensional – idealised, passive characters who simply suffered all sorts of misfortunes, and so the fact that Austen’s Elizabeth or Emma were in fact far from faultless makes them more attractive and sympathetic. In a letter to her niece Austen said jokingly, ‘Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick and wicked.’ Dido Twite, Joan’s enduring heroine, is also far from perfect, in fact she starts out in Black Hearts in Battersea as a perfect pest, or ‘Brat’, as Simon calls her. But it is her fallibility, even her neediness, her cockiness and stubbornness that in the end make her sympathetic, and just as Simon softens towards her and begins to see her true spirit, so do we. Joan confessed that she had considered letting Dido disappear at the end of this first book, but she had one particularly anguished letter from a fan, saying ‘please please write a book having Dido come back,’ which made her relent. Austen’s family related that Jane had all sorts of plans for her characters’ future lives, and described what might have befallen them in later years, which has perhaps helped to encourage the writing of Austen sequels – it is as hard for the writer as it is for the reader to part from characters they have grown fond of in the course of a book. Joan, towards the end of her life was deeply troubled that she had left the two main characters in her Wolves Chronicles in an impossible situation. She felt she owed it not just to her readers, but to Simon and Dido themselves to extricate them from the plight where she had left them, and give them the possibility of a happy ending. She wrote in an afterword to her last book, The Witch of Clatteringshaws that reading Jane Austen’s unfinished book The Watsons had been ‘very, very teasing. You want so much to know what would have happened next’ and so she had to go on and write an ending for Austen’s book herself. As to her own work she apologised for ‘taking some wild leaps’ and writing rather a short book to end her great series, but better to do that than fail to finish it. And Dido certainly lives on for many, many readers – perhaps someday someone will write a sequel for her too?
Simon and Dido
Illustration by Robin Jacques
Great to see that Favourite Aiken Moments could be a good idea?
If you send me suggestions I’ll put some up on the Joan’s Quotes page of the blog.
Here’s some friendly advice from the lost Queen’s boots in
Over the Cloudy Mountains, the first story in “The Winter Sleepwalker”
illustrated by Quentin Blake
It’s great to see that Aiken fans in Japan are discovering these pages – Hello and Welcome!
Last year I had the pleasure of meeting Tomoko Kodama who has been translating Joan’s Wolves Chronicles into Japanese – no easy task if you are familiar with Joan’s wild language and crazy dialects. I am very curious to know how this comes out in translation, let alone all her jokes and riddles… but it’s been fun trying to explain them!
Now there is a new Japanese translation by Tomoko of Joan’s story collection – The Winter Sleepwalker – which also came out in a beautiful new edition in the UK recently, with original illustrations by Quentin Blake. My favourite picture is of the eight legged horse dashing up a mountain, with it’s mysterious one eyed rider, but there is also a sleepwalking bear, a football game in space and a ghostly enchanted duckpond, all in Quentin’s familiar eccentric style.
Here’s the Japanese version!
‘Twelve layers thick of stiff,rolled-up rug, all glued together with fried potatoes, formed a wrap that was solid as oakwood. And when at last her head did begin to emerge from its carpet-collar, Is found that she had nothing much to be thankful for. Instead of being pressed against a filthy carpet, her cheek now lay on stony, gritty, freezing ground. It was dark, with no moon or stars to give comfort; on the contrary, a fine thick snow was falling, blowing like dust into the folds of the rug.
“Snow!” said Is in disgust. Why it ain’t but November!”
But then she recalled how far north she had travelled, into a colder darker part of the country. Humberland.
….A massive stone building loomed up on her right…a church…somewhere she had heard that church doors are always open. The first door she approached had a white paper on it, just visible, and writing on the paper: PLEASE ENTER BY SOUTH DOOR.
There! she could hear Penny’s triumphant voice: now do you see how handy it is to be able to read? Yus, and which way is south? Is retorted, but she acknowledged that if she kept walking round the church she must in the end find the south door.’
Is (Underground) Wolves Chronicles
Illustration by Pat Marriott
Do you have a favourite Aiken moment, from a letter or a talk that Joan gave? Or something from a story, a quotation from Dido perhaps?
Here’s a piece about Dido’s two sisters, Penny and Is (short for Isabett, but no one ever seems to call her that!) Is, trying to avoid the guards on the sinister PLAYLAND EXPRESS has dived into a roll of carpet, and now while she’s wondering how to get out again, has a moment for reflection. Interesting that Pen who teaches Is to read has made use of some of Joan’s own stories, like The Three Wishes, and possibly some of her own philosophy?
“She thought about Penny’s stories. There was one about a man who had three wishes and married a swan. If I had three wishes, I know what I’d wish for, thought Is. I’d wish for those two boys to be found, and for us all to be back on Blackheath Edge. She thought about Penny teaching her to read.
“What’s the point of reading?” Is had grumbled at first. “You can allus tell me stories, that’s better than reading.”
“I’ll not always be here,” Penny had said shortly. “Besides, once you can read, you can learn somebody else. Folk should teach each other folk what they know.”
“Why?”
“If you don’t learn anything, you don’t grow. And someone’s gotta learn you.”
Well, thought Is, if I get outta here, I’ll be able to learn some other person the best way to get free from a rolled-up rug.”
Is (Underground) The Wolves Chronicles
If you enjoyed Joan’s early story about Sir Denis and the Devil you might like to see how he appears in Joan’s later writing – the Devil that is! Here he meets a young Polish officer in a small fishing village, hoping to lead him astray, but this hero is no Faust and things turn out rather differently…
Focusing largely on prolific British fictionist Aiken’s early works from the late 1950s and early 1960s, this imaginative posthumous collection includes among others six never before published short stories and two originally published under a pseudonym. “Honeymaroon” chronicles the adventures of a castaway typist who lands on an island inhabited by sentient mice; “Girl in a Whirl” features a motorcycle-riding, man-hating, daredevil albinoess; “Octopi in the Sky” follows a man haunted by images of cephalopods; and in “A Mermaid Too Many,” a sailor’s exotic present for his lover–a mermaid in a bottle–has unforeseen consequences.
The charm and unrestrained quality of Aiken’s early stories are put into stark perspective by an essay from her daughter Lizza, who offers up glimpses into a particularly difficult period in her mother’s life: Shortly after the end of WWII, widowed and homeless with two young children, Aiken made the bold decision to support herself and her family by writing. Wildly inventive, darkly lyrical, and always surprising, this collection–like the mermaid in a bottle–is a literary treasure that should be cherished by fantastical fiction fans of all ages.
Joan started writing stories from the age of five, and kept all her early notebooks as you can see!
(Scroll down for part one of this story.)
As promised, the final part of one of Joan’s earliest stories… in part one Sir Denis was doomed to be tormented by the Devil for swearing and general bad behaviour until the starry teapot in the sky resumed its proper form…
Joan went on to write many more stories about the Devil, but he didn’t always come to grief…
This is so intriguing! You are so mean to tease us with the wealth of styles, settings, characters, tones and audiences that Joan writes in, about and for. And here am I still hoping to acquire a copy of the out-of-print The Cockatrice Boys!
You also draw attention to Joan’s life as a traveller, Greece here, Spain for the Felix books, Nantucket and Wales for example for Dido stories, all far cries from the common view of her as a quintessentially parochial English writer (albeit one with extraordinary imagination). Desperate now for an authoritative biography…
Thank you so much for your enthusiasm! I never know if I am overdoing it, as obviously I am a committed fan – but as you say, there is such a wealth of material, let alone background, that I am keen to share (and get some feedback about!) so that it is not lost, and I guess this is a good way of dipping a toe in the water…
No, I don’t think you’re overdoing it: there’s more to Joan than just the Wolves Chronicles and it’s important to put it out there.