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…
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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 