Fans of the children’s author Joan Aiken are lapping up the first ever collection of her Armitage family stories, which has just been published in the UK.
The author of The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, celebrated on Friday by a Google doodle, invented the stories of the Armitage children, Mark and Harriet, as a child. The tales of a family with a pet unicorn, a fairy godmother, to whom “lots of interesting and unusual things” happen – especially on a Monday – were first told to her little brother as they walked on the Sussex Downs. As a teenager, in the late 1930s, she sent one of her Armitage stories, Yes, But Today is Tuesday, to the BBC, and it was accepted and broadcast.
Aiken would go on writing about the Armitage family for the next 60 years, in between penning some of the 20th century’s best-loved children’s books, from the alternate history James III saga, which opens with 1962’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, to Black Hearts in Battersea and The Whispering Mountain, which won the Guardian award for children’s fiction in 1969.
Before she died in 2004, the author of more than 100 books, Aiken wrote the last few Armitage tales, sending them off to be collected for the first time in a book she hoped to be called The Serial Garden. Published in the US in 2012, it was released in August in the UK by Virago Modern Classics, illustrated by Peter Bailey.
“Joan Aiken has created so many wonderful stories for all to enjoy and we are thrilled to be publishing The Complete Armitage Family Stories in the form of The Serial Garden,” said spokesperson Poppy Stimpson. “Just on the mention of her name, smiles spread across faces and everybody seems to have a story about their discovery of her writing. She was a woman for whom stories were everything and she lives on today in every character she created.”
Google, marking what would have been Aiken’s 91st birthday with a doodle drawn by Kevin Laughlin of a scene from The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, said that “every so often an extraordinarily prolific author comes along to win the hearts of a generation. Writer Joan Aiken was one of those authors.”
The search engine called her writing, which ranges from children’s books to thrillers, “stunning”, saying that “it’s hard enough to write for a single audience, but Joan was comfortable writing a range of stories that everyone could enjoy”.
Google has previously marked anniversaries for writers ranging from Tolstoy to Mark Twain.
