Visit the Joan Aiken You Tube Page to see her at home using this typewriter
The complete set of Joan Aiken’s historical novels – Regency Romp, Gothic Melodrama & Austen Entertainments (or sometimes a mixture of all three!) are now being republished as EBooks and gorgeous new paperbacks, so if you want to discover a whole new world of ‘Joan Aiken for Grown-ups’ (or your well thumbed copies are falling apart!) now is the moment to stock up your collection as they are all coming out as handsome Pan paperbacks.
The three novels above are loosely known as the Paget Family Trilogy because they are all partly set in a family home, the Hermitage, in Petworth Sussex where Joan Aiken spent the last years of her life. But these Paget women are great travellers; the first novel The Smile of The Stranger is set at the time of the French revolution in the 1790’s, with a hazardous escape across the Channel by balloon! The last one The Girl from Paris opens in a very familiar Pensionnat in Brussels (known to Charlotte Bronte!) and travels to the exotic salons of Paris in around 1860. The middle one, The Weeping Ash covers a fantastic journey from Afghanistan and Persia all the way back to the family home in Petworth, England. All make use of historical events and characters of the time – in Petworth we meet the 3rd Earl of Egremont, owner of Petworth House with its magnificent park and gardens designed by Capability Brown and painted by Turner, and of course the Prince Regent himself on a visit from his Pavilion in Brighton…
Between them, this series, and Joan Aiken’s other period novels, draw on the innovative literary and historical style of the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, when female writers like Mrs Radcliffe who invented the Gothic Romance with The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Jane Austen, who read her predecessor avidly, produced her own Gothic parody with Northanger Abbey, and proceeded to create a new style of ‘romantic’ novel that has been a model for female authors ever since. In her own styles and settings, Joan Aiken goes on to encompass the rest of the nineteenth century – an extremely fertile period for the development of the novel – that takes us through the Brontes and Dickens, from wildly Gothic to more urban settings, and then on to the sensational novels such as Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White, right up to the ghostly tales and grand international romances of Henry James.
It is hard to pin down Joan Aiken’s style, she revels in Gothic Romance, with Romance in the sense of finding beauty and adventure even in the everyday, and Gothic in her use of mystery, suspense and fantastic settings, with her keen eye for period style and historical detail, and her usual tongue-in-cheek critique of the role of the heroine, in the novel and in society. Add to that an understanding of literary tradition, and perhaps a well-read heroine, who is sometimes a writer herself, some pacey dialogue, eccentric but sympathetic characters, and a thoroughly modern interpretation of relationships ( and sometimes a touch of terror!) and you begin to get the picture…
‘Regency’ has also become a pretty wide ranging category, more or less invented by the prolific Georgette Heyer, who also took Jane Austen as an early model, but whose style has come to mean a comedy of manners in a period setting rather than a full on Romance. These next three Aiken novels go from the very Heyerish Five Minute Marriage (with elements of Dickensian London) to Deception dedicated to all female writers – a moving family saga and daring impersonation drama set in a remote Northumbrian mansion. Finally Joan Aiken comes to to full on Gothic Horror in the style of Mrs Radcliffe or Sir Walter Scott with her Castle Barebane, whose heroine steps straight out of Henry James and meets a Jack the Ripper style villain….this one is coming as a paperback next year, but if you can’t wait, the EBook is out now https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/joan-aiken/castle-barebane/9781509877522
Joan Aiken’s ‘Austen Entertainments’ as she called them take up the stories of some of Austen’s lesser characters or younger sisters – one of the four Ward sisters from Mansfield Park for instance, The Youngest Miss Ward – to give them their own stories – in this case a reversal of Austen’s plot – rich girl goes to live with poor relations! In another she completes The Watsons one of Austen’s own unfinished fragments with Emma Watson.
These two are now out as handsome new paperbacks.
Jane Austen was Aiken’s most admired literary predecessor, and though the adventures of the Aiken heroines may be a trifle wilder, as she allows them an independence that Austen could not, there is nothing in these imaginative sequels that a young Jane Austen – author of some fairly tongue-in-cheek parodies herself in her younger years – might not enjoy!
It is delightful to see all these novels becoming available again, they are a hugely important part of Joan Aiken’s literary career, whether for Aiken aficionados, or new readers moving on from the Willoughby Chase series or her other children’s works who never dreamed that these gripping and eminently readable titles even existed.
Find out much more about all of them on the Joan Aiken website – and welcome to the Aiken ABC!
New to Joan Aiken? Here’s an idea of what NOT to expect…!
https://joanaiken.wordpress.com/2017/11/17/its-a-joan-aiken-novel-what-did-you-expect/
…and Reviewers are incredulous!
“What is Joan Aiken doing back in Regency land? Having fun – with the most ingenious Impostures and Deceits, not to mention attempted Murders, practiced on a most agreeable heroine. A country dance in the high style twirled to the tune of a proven virtuoso.”
This Kirkus reviewer obviously enjoyed this very un-Aiken piece of frivolity, as have a good many other readers and bloggers – as indeed does Joan Aiken herself!
A huge fan of Georgette Heyer, whose novels were serialised in magazines like Woman’s Journal where her own stories also appeared, Joan Aiken couldn’t resist having a go at the style herself, and revelling in nonsensical dialogue and period detail, she certainly took a leaf or two out of Heyer’s books…
Here the scene is set in fine style, with our heroine Delphie consoling her clueless Mamma:
“Why do you all scold me so,” she sobbed, “when I only did it for the best?”
“Did what, Mamma? What did you do?”
“Why, went to St. Paul’s to pray for a husband for you, naturally!”
Delphie hardly knew whether to laugh or weep. What a hopeless quest! What a piteous pilgrimage! At least it had not involved Mrs. Carteret in any outrageous, wild expense, but it seemed highly probable that she might have caught her death from wet and exhaustion.
“That was a very kind, thoughtful thing to do,” Delphie said, giving her parent a warm and loving embrace, and then proceeding to whisk off the sodden shawl, “but, you know, I don’t want a husband, I would rather by far remain with you.”
“Of course you want a husband,” said Mrs. Carteret, shivering miserably as the draggled silk was peeled away from her shoulders. “For if you had a good one, we could all live together and he would support us!”
The heroines of most Regency Romances may put up a struggle against the bonds of matrimony and fight for their independence, but when the choice is between marriage or a life of penury – in this case Delphie works as a struggling pianist coaching snobbish and grumpy society maidens – we know where their hearts and hopes really lie…
But Joan Aiken was not known for giving her poor heroines an easy ride, let alone even a happy ending, as many readers have remonstrated about other Aiken novels:
“It’s more of a comedy with an excess of plot…and turns totally Gothic towards the end” or they describe the novel as “a lunatic farrago of wackiness” which is happily also “funny, fluffy and frothy.”
However in this particular case, although they may have been (formally!) married for the entirety of the novel, when the hero, having at last overcome all obstacles, manages to clasp the wretched girl in his arms and beg:
“But do you love me?”
( Spoilers Ahead! )
Delphie’s reply is unexpected:
“Oh, good gracious! How can you conceive of such a notion? Why, I came to Chase—walking five miles through a downpour, I may say, because that odious Mordred made off with my carriage-followed you up onto the roof—clambered over I do not know how many obstacles—dragged your lifeless corpse back from the chasm’s brink—all from motives of the calmest—most phlegmatic—neutrality—and altruism—”
The last words came out of her in jerks, for he was shaking her.
“Oh, you little wretch! How often have I not longed to wring your neck! Or at the very least to do this—”
And he set his lips on hers.
As reviewed by ALL ABOUT ROMANCE
Regency Romances, and Austen Entertainments and gloriously Gothic adventures for Grown Ups:
Now out on Kindle in the USA and in the UK
Is it a Romance? Is it a Gothic? Or is it a literary experiment…
It is certainly a page turner, and a ripping good yarn, as Joan Aiken takes Lousa Alcott’s Josephine March, rather than Jane Austen as her model, although the novel begins in the school that Austen herself attended… Joan Aiken brings us a Regency heroine who, enthralled with writing her first novel, and desperate for a chance to complete it, seizes on an unusual opportunity to run away from her past, albeit by practicing a slight deception…
This book came out with two titles – in the USA known as If I Were You, and in the UK as Deception, it tells a double story, about an independent heroine who seizes a chance to free herself from the constraints of her history, by becoming someone else, and possibly, through this deception, succeeding as a published author.
But peaceful it is not! When Alvey agrees to take the placeof her doppelganger Louisa, who sails away to be a missionary, and goes to stay in a crumbling family mansion on the moors of Northumberland, she finds her new ‘family’ is more than a match for her adventurous spirit; the wildness of the landscape is matched by the extraordinary people who live there. Soon her writer’s imagination comes to her rescue, and she becomes embroiled in this new life, in comparison with which her wild Romantic creation and previous passion – Wicked Lord Love – begins to take second place.
Joan Aiken’s Dedication to the novel below, invites readers, and writers, to enjoy a double deception, because this story takes us into the mind not just of the intrepid heroine, but into the double life of the writer who lives just as often in a fantasy world of her own, and sometimes struggles to reconcile the two.
After getting to know a whole new world of characters in this fictional life she has agreed to live out, what will happen to our heroine’s imaginary hero, her fantastic first love? Can he survive, or will she, like Jo March from Little Women, abandon the Gothic Romance of her early literary endeavours, and decide that real people are more powerful subjects for her pen, and more importantly, for her life?
While trying to avoid spoilers, I can’t resist mentioning two favourite characters – the small wild children of the household who worship nature and its Pagan Gods, in whom our heroine (and Joan Aiken too of course) recognises her own early creative spirit; they recall her own fantasy adventures as a lonely country child, brought up on local lore and poetry, which informed her own fantastic story telling gift, and allow her to revisit a part of the country where she also spent idyllic holidays with a family not her own…
Out now from Pan Macmillan ~ New Paperback Joan Aiken titles
Visit their site to see the whole collection
https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/joan-aiken/2210
Joan Aiken 