Joan Aiken was the author of some of the best-loved children’s books of our time. That said, she rarely received due recognition from the moguls of the children’s book world. In 1969 she received the Guardian award for The Whispering Mountain, a work chiefly distinguished by her joy in using criminal argot, but discriminating readers young and old are baffled that she remained so little regarded at a time when much lesser work is being greeted with drums and trumpets.

She had the gift of creating imaginary but believable worlds and characters that enchanted both children and adults. She herself liked to live in worlds of her own, and although she had many friends, she was something of a recluse.

Joan Delano Aiken was born in 1924 in Rye, East Sussex, the second daughter and third child of the American poet Conrad Aiken and his highly educated Canadian wife Jessie McDonald. However, her father had left his family before she was born. His autobiography, Ushant, describes how he paid an unexpected visit a couple of years later. He walked into the house unheralded and found a small red-haired toddler playing on the floor. She immediately called out to her mother that a man was there — which made him walk out again. He did not meet his youngest child again for some years, though she did later establish contact with him. She had great respect for his literary talents, and during his declining years she paid frequent visits to him in his native Savannah, Georgia.

She did not go to school until she was 12. Instead, her mother kept her at home and gave her a rigorous general and literary training which included not only mathematics, Latin and French but also wide reading and exercising in rewriting the Bible in the style of Shakespeare and rewriting Dickens in the style of Trollope. She was also strongly influenced by her stepfather, the writer and critic Martin Armstrong.

When eventually she was sent to boarding school she was regarded as a genius both in school subjects and for her creativity, which was manifest in her drawing and painting as well as her poetry and stories. She completed the manuscript of her first full-length novel when she was 16.

She aimed to read English at Somerville College, Oxford, following her elder sister Jane (the writer Jane Aiken Hodge). However, she failed the entrance exam — being turned down by the formidable Mary Lascelles, who also turned down Iris Murdoch.

Instead Joan Aiken did a secretarial course and worked for a number of organisations, including the BBC, the short-story magazine Argosy and J Walter Thompson. She worked at the United Nations, collating information about resistance movements, from 1943 to 1949. Meanwhile she wrote and wrote and wrote, which was what she always wanted to do.

Her first book, All You’ve Ever Wanted, a collection of brilliant short stories, was published when she was 18 and was closely followed by More Than You Bargained For. Both of these were successful, and they were followed by a steady, unceasing output. Asked why she wrote or what satisfaction she gained from it, she said she just loved to tell a story and hoped to bend someone’s ear.

She was already practised in storytelling from entertaining her younger half-brother, and she always liked to read aloud, doing so in a way that captivated her audience. To her own children she read Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot and many more. Naturally she fitted perfectly into the BBC’s storytelling slot Jackanory, and she was also prominent in the activities of the Puffin Club in its heyday under Kaye Webb, who produced a short film about her.

She was generous to budding writers who sought her advice and, although she would deny it, she proved an incisive lecturer on children’s books on the rare occasions when she agreed to speak. She also wrote a most sensible manual on The Way to Write for Children (1983).

Her first husband was the journalist Ron Brown, whom she married in 1945, but he died in 1955, leaving her with two small children and almost no money. As soon as she felt she was earning enough from her writing, she moved to Petworth in her native Sussex and bought an old house, with low ceilings, small doors and peculiar crannies that fitted her small frame.

From there she produced some 20 novels for adults, ingeniously exploiting the possibilities of crime and mystery stories, but her high distinction as a writer lies in her varied and richly imaginative books for children. The axis around which these coruscate is the long and inventive series of adventures that began with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase in 1962, which are predicated upon the alternative history of a Stuart monarchy continuing into the 19th century with Hanoverians questing for control. “The wolves arrived in England through a Channel tunnel built in those times.”

The first sequel to this, Black Hearts in Battersea (1964) saw the emergence of feisty Dido Twite, a cockney girl who was to be central in most of the six “Georgian” novels that followed. But as Aiken herself noted, her writing alongside these books roved out into areas of brisk comedy, such as the tales of Arabel and her raven that were originally written for Jackanory, areas of realistic fiction, such as the brilliant historical trilogy that began with Go Saddle the Sea (1977), and the territory of Kunstmärchen or invented fairytales, several collections of which were luxuriously illustrated by Jan Pienkowski. To this group belongs her fairly recent collection The Winter Sleepwalker, illustrated by Quentin Blake (1994), which some have adjudged not only her finest book, but one of the most beautiful children’s books of the 20th century.

Her house was always full of publisher’s copies of her books, which she gave out to any children who visited, though she never knew quite what to do with the Japanese ones.

She began to spend part of her time in New York, and in 1977, after more than 20 years on her own and with her children long since independent, she married the American painter Julius Goldstein, which heralded a long and happy relationship until he died in 2001.

Aiken was a very private woman, and though always hospitable and welcoming to visitors, she very much liked to spend time alone. It was a strain for her even to employ a cleaner, and until fairly recently she preferred to do the housework herself and also the gardening in her large garden.

She had inherited or learnt from her mother a high standard of household management, including cooking, which produced excellent meals. Her skills did not, however, generally extend to technology. She resisted learning to drive until she was 40, but then went on to take and pass the test for advanced drivers. She refused to have anything to do with computers, insisting that they encourage verbosity. Relying entirely on her old typewriter, she produced a hundred books.

The Midwinter Nightingale was published last year, and she posted her last typescript, The Witch of Clatteringshaws, to her publishers only two days before she died.

She is survived by her son and daughter.

Joan Aiken, writer, was born on September 4, 1924. She died on January 4, 2004, aged 79.