Visit the Joan Aiken You Tube Page to see her at home using this typewriter
…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
Julius Goldstein, who married Joan Aiken in 1976, was born on 17th March
He was a lifelong New Yorker, who enjoyed his days in a fifth floor walk-up in Greenwich Village, where he was able to indulge his love of movies and galleries, and for many years taught art at Hunter College, CUNY. Julius had also visited and fallen in love with England and loved to paint its landscapes. Introduced by mutual friends, and married in 1976, Joan and Julius lived half the year in his favourite city, and half in the quiet town of Petworth, in Sussex, at the foot of the South Downs. Here he was able to paint to his heart’s content in a garden studio looking out over hills and valleys, while she, in fact half American was able to re-discover her roots and make wonderful new friends in the exciting city of his birth.
A master of the colour green, he had the most perfect birth-date, and was charmingly flattered that his birth city put on a spectacular parade for his birthday every year…
Here is a typical Goldstein Sussex study in his favourite colour
Find him on Joan’s picture timeline https://www.joanaiken.com/timeline/
on the Joan Aiken website
Joan Aiken 