This ghost story recounts in fictional form an alleged haunting experienced by two former residents of the house, Henry James and E. She set her adult supernatural novel The Haunting of Lamb House at Lamb House in Rye (now a National Trust property). These include Mansfield Revisited and Jane Fairfax.Īiken was a lifelong fan of ghost stories. Her many novels for adults include several that continue or complement novels by Jane Austen. Others including the much loved Necklace of Raindrops and award winning Kingdom Under the Sea are illustrated by Jan Pieńkowski. These books also feature cockney urchin heroine Dido Twite and her adventures and travels all over the world.Īnother series of children's books about Arabel and her raven Mortimer are illustrated by Quentin Blake, and have been shown on the BBC as Jackanory and drama series.

Her most popular series, the 'Wolves Chronicles' which began with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, was set in an elaborate alternate period of history in a Britain in which James II was never deposed in the Glorious Revolution,and so supporters of the House of Hanover continually plot to overthrow the Stuart Kings. For her books she received the Guardian Award (1969) and the Edgar Allan Poe Award (1972). She worked for the United Nations Information Office during the second world war, and then as an editor and freelance on Argosy magazine before she started writing full time, mainly children's books and thrillers.

She was born in Rye, East Sussex, into a family of writers, including her father, Conrad Aiken (who won a Pulitzer Prize for his poetry), and her sister, Jane Aiken Hodge. She was known as a writer of wild fantasy, Gothic novels and short stories. A big disappointment.Joan Aiken was a much loved English writer who received the MBE for services to Children's Literature.

Better are Geraldine James, Mel Smith, and Aleks Darowska (as Sylvia), who have just the right degree of moderation. Budgetary restraints presumably worked against a more imaginative, broad-ranging use of locations, but this doesn't explain the casting of Stephanie Beacham as Slighcarp (playing on her soap opera associations) and of Emily Hudson as the dreadful Bonnie. Eventually the pair are carted off from a life of splendour to a grim orphanage, while the greedy oppressors work in the wings. They squabble over Sylvia's lack of courage, while Bonnie rebounds of life's knocks with distictly unappealing, gormless innocence. Thereafter, bogged down in Victorian gloom, some of the book's more glorious passages are neglected, while there seems no dramatic point in beefing up the relationship between evil governess Slighcarp and her henchman Grimshaw, only to pit the two young heroines Bonnie and Sylvia against each other. Any fidelity to Joan Aiken's classic for kids is captured in the opening sequences, with their snowbound landscapes, helpless orphan traveller, and treacherous forests.

Book the wolves of willoughby chase