![]() For her, the characters of the books that filled her life, lived on past the ending of the story they continued to be her companions in ongoing adventures, they didn’t just disappear, disposed of by a tidy, happy ending. But she also became aware of the inadequacy of the ‘happy ever after’ ending of stories she read. She identified strongly with this, remembering her own childhood, and how she had been spurred on by many unfulfilled hopes – to bring her divorced parents back together to get the chemicals for experiments she read about in her brother’s science books to grow wings…and these powerful imaginings eventually became translated into the need to write stories, and to create in fiction the outcomes that otherwise were unobtainable. “If a child is, for some reason, unable to imagine his future optimistically, arrest of development sets in.” ![]() Joan Aiken often quoted an idea from Bruno Bettelheim, who wrote: ![]() But then anguished letters from readers began to pour in, and also something in Dido’s own character changed Joan Aiken’s mind it did not seem possible that Dido would have given up, and just drifted away. Joan Aiken has admitted that she had imagined Dido drowning at the end of Black Hearts in Battersea, giving her own life to save her friend Simon. It is not surprising that Dido Twite is such an enduring heroine, her very survival was a piece of luck, or perhaps was ensured by her own strongest character trait – she never gave up hope.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |