Benson, both of whom also wrote ghost stories. 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). Some of her books focus on spine-chilling or supernatural events, including The Windscreen Weepers (stories, 1969), The Shadow Guests (novel, 1980), A Whisper in the Night (stories, 1982), and A Creepy Company (stories, 1993, with variant contents in its US and UK editions). James, Fitz James O'Brien and Nugent Barker. She was a lifelong fan of ghost stories, particularly those of M. Joan Aiken produced more than a hundred books, including more than a dozen collections of fantasy stories, plays and poems, and modern and historical novels for adults and children. In September 1999, Aiken was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire.Īiken died at home at the age of 79 in 2004. They divided their time between her home, the Hermitage in Petworth, Sussex, and New York. By then she was able to write full-time from home, producing two or three books a year for the rest of her life, mainly children's books and thrillers, as well as many articles, introductions and talks on children's literature and on the work of Jane Austen.Īiken married the New York landscape painter and teacher Julius Goldstein in 1976.

During this time she also published her first two collections of children's stories and began work on a children's novel, initially titled Bonnie Green, which was later published in 1962 as The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. The magazine was one of many in which she published short stories between 19. They had two children before he died in 1955.Īfter her husband's death, Aiken joined the magazine Argosy, where she worked in various editorial capacities and, she later said, learned her trade as a writer. In September 1945 she married Ronald George Brown, a journalist who was also working at UNIC. In 1941 her first children's story was broadcast on the BBC's Children's Hour.Īiken worked for the United Nations Information Centre (UNIC) in London between 19.

Writing stories from an early age, she finished her first full-length novel when she was sixteen and had her first short story for adults accepted for publication when she was seventeen. Aiken was taught at home by her mother until the age of twelve and from 1936 to 1940 at Wychwood School for girls in North Oxford.

Mortimer's Tie by Joan Aiken