Joan Aiken came from a literary family--her father, Conrad Aiken, was a distinguished American poet and her stepfather, Martin Armstrong, was a novelist. It was no surprise that at the age of five, Aiken bought a notebook and decided that she would be a writer when she grew up. Using the haunting country settings that she experienced as a youth, Aiken has written many well-received children's stories and several books for adults. She has legions of fans around the world who, after reading her books, have become hooked on her many mysterious and fantastical stories.

"A happy childhood is supposed to lead to neurosis in middle age. By which criterion I should be a hundred percent neurotic, for my childhood was, in most ways, extremely happy," Joan Aiken wrote in an autobiographical essay in Something About the Author Autobiography Series (SAAS). However, her young life was not without...