And she was writing perfectly functional novels for adults all through the learning curve of writing for children, which also fascinates me, since I don't think of the two as all that different the way she wrote for both at her best, but either the skill set transferred less than I would have expected or she had to learn to trust herself that it did.

I think Joan Aiken said something once about her children’s books and her adult books becoming more like each other over the years as she got less afraid of the children not being able to cope with the material-- though given that she killed off Dido Twite in the first novel in which she appeared, and only brought her back after receiving a letter from a young fan, I don’t believe she could have been *too* worried, even in the early days, about traumatizing younger readers.