From The Wolves of Willoughby Chase to Black Hearts in Battersea, Joan Aiken’s tales of plucky orphans surviving in industrial Britain are a keystone of children’s literature

There was once a poor widow with two young children who wrote to her agent to ask what had happened to the novel she had sent him. Her husband had died, leaving nothing but debts, and matters were becoming desperate. However, she was not quite the usual aspiring author: for one thing, she was the daughter of a Pulitzer prize-winning poet; for another, she had already published two collections of short stories.

It turned out that her agent had forgotten all about it. Her manuscript had been sitting on the windowsill in his office for a year, unread.