(You can listen to this episode here.)
Mary Grace and Deborah commemorate the 100th anniversary of British author Joan Aiken’s birth by reading Black Hearts in Battersea, the second in her Wolves Chronicles series, featuring resourceful orphans and sinister plots in an alt-history version of nineteenth-century London.
(Note: Mary Grace thought for fifty years that Dido Twite’s first name was pronounced DEE-doh rather than DIE-doh, and she slips back to this pronunciation a few times.)
Mentioned on the episode:
Other books in the Wolves Chronicles series:
The Wolves of Willoughby Chase
Other books by Joan Aiken:
Other Rereading Our Childhood episodes:
Rereading February’s Road by John Verney
Rereading The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) by Ellen Raskin
Rereading Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers
Rereading Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary
Rereading The Children of Green Knowe by L.M. Boston
Rereading The Owl Service by Alan Garner
Rereading The Book of Three by Lloyd Alexander
Also mentioned:
The Shortest History of England by James Hawes
Post on Black Hearts in Battersea on the blog A Son of the Rock (question King James’s Scottish accent)
“What’s Your 1918 Girl Job? A Quiz,” post on Mary Grace’s blog My Life 100 Years Ago that mentions Jane Fairfax. (Jane Fairfax also comes up on another post, “Jane Austen’s Life 100 Years Ago.”)
“Writing Without Limits: Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase Series,” Albion Magazine Online (discusses Aiken taking time to settle on a main character for the series)
The best and worst of April 1918: Magazines, stories, faint praise, and neologisms (Mary Grace’s blog post that mentions Conrad Aiken)
A well-known letter from T.S. Eliot to Conrad Aiken is quoted here.
The Practical Magic of Joan Aiken, the Greatest Children’s Writer You’ve Likely Never Read (The New Yorker)*
Blog on Joan Aiken by her daughter Lizza Aiken
Blog post by Lizza Aiken about Aiken’s partnership with illustrator Pat Marriot
Locus Magazine interview with Aiken in which she discusses The Chronicles of Narnia and the BBC adaptation of Black Hearts in Battersea
Suggested reading for fans of Black Hearts in Battersea: Other books in the series (Deborah), The Book of Three and its sequels (Mary Grace)
The podcast is hosted by Buzzsprout at rereadingourchildhood.buzzsprout.com and is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and other platforms.
You can find Deborah’s author interviews on her blog, Books Q&A by Deborah Kalb, and Mary Grace’s adventures in the 1920s on her blog, My Life 100 Years Ago.
This episode was edited by Adam Linder of Bespoken Podcasting.
*Mary Grace took offense at this headline.
Rereading Our Childhood 