A prolific author who penned such children's classics as The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase has died, aged 79.

Joan Aiken, who wrote 92 novels during her career, was born in Rye and spent her last years in Petworth.

Best remembered for her children's books, including Abigail's Raven and Midwinter Nightingale, she also wrote 27 novels for adults, among them Trouble with Product X, which drew on her experience of working in advertising.

She also lworked in TV, writing the jingles for Dairylea cheese, produced plays and wrote poems.

The daughter of American poet Conrad Aiken and Canadian author Jessie McDonal Aiken, Joan was first educated at home in Rye along with her sister Jane, a novelist based in Lewes.

Her parents separated when Joan was five and her mother remarried writer Martin Armstrong.

The family home, Jeakes House, was said to be haunted and it was the inspiration for many of Joan's bizarre and ghostly plots.

The sisters were encouraged to write from an early age and spent hours swapping ideas for stories.

Joan was sent to Wychwood boarding school, Oxford, at the age of 12 and from the age of 16 her short stories were being regularly read out on BBC radio's Children's Hour.

She was 18 when her first short story was published. Entitled The Dreamers, it was about a man who stews his wife in a pressure cooker. She continued to write while working as a clerk for the BBC.

She got a job in the reference department of the London office of the United Nations in 1943 where she collected information about resistance movements.

In 1943 she married Ron Brown, a news agency journalist. They had two children.

He died in 1955 and in 1976 Joan married the American painter Julius Goldstein, who died a few years later.