Aiken, Joan (1924– ), Anglo‐American author. The daughter of the American poet Conrad Aiken, she was born and educated in England, where she now lives. She has published over 60 children's books, as well as many adult novels. Her titles for children include ghost stories, historical fiction, plays, and picture books. She has also written several collections of brilliantly original fairy tales. They include All You've Ever Wanted (1953), More Than You Bargained For (1955), A Necklace of Raindrops (1968), A Small Pinch of Weather (1969), A Harp of Fishbones (1972), Not What You Expected (1974), Up the Chimney Down (1984), The Last Slice of Rainbow (1985), and Past Eight o'clock (1987).
As a teller of fairy stories, Joan Aiken is the natural heir of Edith Nesbit. Her vivid and amazingly inventive tales, like Nesbit's, are usually set in contemporary England, and much of their surprise and humour comes from the juxtaposition of traditional magic and modern technology. (In ‘Up the Chimney Down’ the wicked witch even owns a computer.)
Like Nesbit's, Aiken's tales sometimes have an undertone of social satire. In ‘The Brat Who Knew Too Much’, for instance, an 8‐year‐old girl with magical encyclopaedic knowledge disrupts first a pretentious panel of experts on the BBC and eventually a large number of international organizations.
Joan Aiken's tales feature not only standard fairy‐story personages and props (kings and queens, witches and wizards, magic objects and spells), but characters and events from modern folklore, including the Tooth Fairy and Good King Wenceslas. Her take on all of them is original and surprising. King Wenceslas's charity, for instance, is misplaced, and in the end it is the ‘poor man gathering winter fuel’ who offers a good meal to the king.
Many of Aiken's tales centre on the experiences of Mark and Harriet Armitage, who live in a rural English village where the existence of magic is taken for granted. Mark and Harriet go to a school run by a witch, have a temporary governess who is a ghost, and keep a pet unicorn. In one of her best stories, ‘A Small Pinch of Weather’, the family is visited both by a pompous ex‐colonial great‐uncle and the Furies, three dog‐faced ladies in black who eat pins and cause everyone who comes to the house to reveal their past crimes: ‘the window‐cleaner … was now on his knees in the flowerbed, confessing to anyone who would listen that he had pinched a diamond brooch. … the man who came to mend the fridge … seemed frightfully upset about something he had done to a person called Elsie’.
Most of Joan Aiken's tales are full of fun and surprise and end happily, but some look at the world from a more contemplative and poetic perspective. A few even end with sadness and loss, like ‘The Serial Garden’, where lovers are separated forever when a cut‐out paper panorama from the back of cereal boxes is destroyed. Clearly, Aiken not only has tremendous inventive powers, but unusual emotional range.
Bibliography
- Apseloff, Marilyn, ‘Joan Aiken: Literary Dramatist’,
Children's Literature Association Quarterly , 9.3 (fall 1984).
— Alison Lurie
