A Joan Aiken ABC – An Aiken Book Bonanza for Completists!

  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!

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Find Period Novels here,  and Austen Entertainments here

And all of them on the Joan Aiken Amazon Page and the PanMacmillan website

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/