The wolf of willoughby chase

In fact she had a Canadian mother, Jessie MacDonald, and an American father, the Pulitzer prize winning poet Conrad Aiken, whose pioneering ancestors travelled to America on the famous pilgrim ship, The Mayflower, just over four hundred years ago in September 1620.īack in the 1920’s the Aiken family, with Joan’s older brother and sister who had been born in New England, in Boston Massachusetts, voyaged back to the old England, to make a new home just before Joan was born in 1924. Joan Aiken had a very American childhood although she was born in England, on September 4th in Rye, the historical seaport on the Sussex coast, her family was American, and she was the only one of her siblings never registered as an American citizen.īest known for her classic, almost Dickensian novel – The Wolves of Willoughby Chase – Joan Aiken has always seemed quintessentially English.