Joan Aiken

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JA was a popular and successful later twentieth-century writer of short stories and longer fictions for children, most of which are fantasies or have strong supernatural or mystery elements. She also wrote adult novels (both thrillers and romances), and last of all of a series of sequels to novels by Jane Austen .
  • BirthName: Joan Delano Aiken
    She never wrote under both her given names, but is often listed under them in the USA.

  • Married: Brown; Goldstein
  • Pseudonyms: Nicholas Dee; John Silver
  • Indexed: Joan Aiken
Black and white photo of Joan Aiken. She stands in front of iron railings like a park fence, with trees behind it. She wears a turtleneck, blazer, and necklace, and has a stern or serious look.

Milestones

4 September 1924

JA was born at Rye in Sussex, the youngest of three children.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford University Press, 1993.

By late November 1962

For her second children's fantasyfiction, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, JA chose a setting in the earlier nineteenth century, but an unfamiliar nineteenth century in which historical events have panned out differently.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.
3169 (23 November 1962): 918
Eccleshare, Julia. “Joan Aiken”. The Guardian Unlimited, 7 Jan. 2004, p. 25.
25

May 1981

JA 's The Stolen Lake, another in the Willoughby Chase series of children'sfantasies, centres on the intrepidDido Twite's adventures in nineteenth-century Brazil.
British Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 1874–1987.
1982
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

October 1984

JA published Mansfield Revisited, A Novel, a sequel to Austen 's Mansfield Park and a harbinger of escalation in fiction of this type.
“Joan Aiken”. Fantastic Fiction.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.

4 January 2004

JA died at the age of seventy-nine.
Eccleshare, Julia. “Joan Aiken”. The Guardian Unlimited, 7 Jan. 2004, p. 25.
25

Biography

Birth and Family

4 September 1924

JA was born at Rye in Sussex, the youngest of three children.
“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.
Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford University Press, 1993.

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