Enid Blyton

Enid Mary Blyton (August 11, 1897 – November 28, 1968) was a British children's author. She is noted particularly for numerous series of books, based on recurring characters and designed for different age groups.

Her prolific output involves mainly children's fantasy, which sometimes involves the supernatural. Her books were immensely popular in Britain, India and Australia and remain so to this day. They have been translated into 40 languages, including Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Malay, Spanish, and Swedish. Translated versions became and have remained extremely popular in many parts of Europe and Asia.

Personal life

Blyton was born at East Dulwich in south London and grew up in Beckenham, Kent with her family. She was a talented pianist, but gave up her musical studies when she trained as a teacher. She taught for five years at Bickley and Surbiton, writing in her spare time.

Her first book "Child Whispers" was published in 1922.

In 1924 she married Hugh Pollock, a book editor and moved to Buckinghamshire. Eventually she and Hugh moved to a house called "Green Hedges" in Beaconsfield. She had two children: Gillian (b. 15 July 1931) and Imogen Smallwood (b. 27 October 1935). She divorced Pollock in 1942 and in the next year she married a surgeon, Kenneth Darrel Waters. She lived with Darrel Waters until he died in 1967. In her last few years of life she suffered from pre-senile dementia. Blyton died in her sleep on November 28, 1968 at a Hampstead, north London nursing home.

Most popular works

Best known of her works are:

• the Noddy books
• The Famous Five
• The Five Find-Outers (also known as the 'Mystery Series')
• The Adventure Series
• The Secret Seven
• Malory Towers
• The St. Clare's series
• The Naughtiest Girl series
• The Magic Faraway Tree series
• The Wishing-Chair series
• The Circus Series
• The Barney Mystery Series
• The Farm Series
• The Secret Series

Other works

File:Enid Blyton Bible Stories.jpg

She wrote hundreds of other books for young and older children. She also filled a large number of magazine pages, particularly the long-running Sunny Stories. An estimate puts her total book publication at around 600 titles, not including decades of magazine writing. It is said at one point she produced 10,000 words a day.

Such astonishingly prolific output led many to believe that some of her work was ghost-written. No ghost writers have come forward. She used a pseudonym Mary Pollock for a few titles (middle name plus first married name). The last volumes in her most famous series were published in 1963. Many books still appeared, but were mainly story books made up from re-cycled work.

Not all of her output was fiction. For example, her series of arithmetic books were for many years the standard in primary schools in the UK. She also wrote numerous books on nature and Biblical themes.

Subject matter

Blyton's books managed to tap into the dreams of pre-pubescent children. The code words are 'mystery' and 'adventure'. Children are free to play and explore without adult interference, more clearly than in most authors before or since. Adult characters are usually either authority figures such as policemen, teachers, or parents, or adversaries to be conquered by the children. The children are often self-sufficient, spending whole days, or even more than one day, away from home. This theme is taken to its extreme in The Secret Island, wherein a group of children run away from uncaring guardians to live on an island together, making a home and fending for themselves until their parents return.

Blyton's books are generally split into three types. One involves ordinary children in extraordinary situations; having adventures, solving crimes, or otherwise finding themselves in unusual circumstances. Examples include the Famous Five and Secret Seven, and the Adventure series. The second type is the boarding school story; the plots of these are usually less extraordinary than the first type, with more emphasis on the day-to-day life at a boarding school. This is the world of the midnight feast, the practical joke, and the social interaction of the various types of character that can be found at school. Examples of this type are the Malory Towers stories, the St Clare's series, and the Naughtiest Girl books.

The third type is the fantastical. Children are typically transported into a magical world in which they meet fairies, goblins, elves, or other fantastical creatures. Examples of this type are the Wishing-Chair books and the Magic Faraway Tree.

Controversies

File:The Three Golliwogs.jpg

Cover of The Three Golliwogs, in which the golliwogs are the heroes.

The books are very much of their time, particularly the 1950s titles. They reflect a none-too-subtle version of Britain's class system, as in rough versus well-behaved. Undoubtedly present are some stereotypes on gender. Some argue, from a current perspective, that the portrayal of golliwogs, amongst others, was racist. On the other hand, the Famous Five displayed a remarkably modern equality of teamwork between the sexes, and while golliwogs often appeared as villains in the Noddy books, elsewhere in her fantasy works they appeared as the heroes.

It was frequently reported, in the 1950s and also from the 1980s onwards, that various children's libraries removed some of Blyton's works from the shelves. The history of such 'Blyton bans' is confused. Some librarians certainly at times felt that Blyton's restricted use of language, a conscious product of her teaching background, militated against appreciation of more literary qualities. There was some precedent, in the treatment of L. Frank Baum's Oz books (and the many sequels, by others) by librarians in the U.S. in the 1930s.

Much play has been made of naive language permitting double entendre (e.g. a tendency to imagine sexual connotations, for instance, Noddy "jumping into bed" with Big Ears, another character, clearly not intended by the author. The "Famous Five" series contains characters called Dick and Fanny also (changed to "Rick" and "Frannie" in modern reprints)). This is probably journalistic froth. This whole area is subject to urban myths and the carefree retelling in newspapers of anecdotes as factual (recycling the old press cuttings, in fact) making it somewhat difficult to discern the truth.

A more careful account of anti-Blyton attacks is given in Chapter 4 of Robert Druce's This Day Our Daily Fictions. The British Journal of Education in 1955 carried a piece by Janice Dohn, an American children's librarian, considering Blyton's writing together with authors of formula fiction, and making negative comments about Blyton's devices and tone. A 1958 article in Encounter by Colin Welch, directed against the Noddy character, was reprinted in a New Zealand librarians' periodical. This gave rise to the first rumour of a New Zealand 'library ban' on Blyton’s books, a recurrent press canard. Policy on buying and stocking Blyton's books by British public libraries drew attention in newspaper reports from the early 1960s to the end of the 1970s, as local decisions were made by a London borough, Birmingham, Nottingham and other central libraries. There is no evidence that her books' popularity ever suffered. She was defended by populist journalists, and others; left-of-centre newspapers ran articles condemning her work, with a piece in 1966 in The Guardian claiming that Blyton wrote more insidiously dangerous right-wing literature than that published by British fascist groups.

Modern reprints of some books have had changes made (such as the replacement of Golliwogs with teddy bears). This is the publishers' reaction to contemporary attitudes on racial stereotypes, and probably enforced by market conditions and pressure groups. It has itself drawn criticism from those adults who view it as tampering with an important piece of the history of children's literature. The Druce book brings up a single case of a story, The Little Black Doll, which could be interpreted as a racist message (the doll wanted to be pink) and which was turned on its head in a reprint.

"Censored" versions also exist of some of Blyton's "boarding-school" books, on the argument that the girls' "special friendships" are a form of lesbianism.

Trivia

An oblique critique of a Blyton work is found in Jasper Fforde's novel The Well of Lost Plots (2003). The heroine, Thursday Next, should change the ending of Shadow the Sheepdog by entering the novel's world. Thursday is surprised at the one-dimensionality of the characters. They have limited vocabulary, intelligence and emotional scope, and are confined to designated paths. Even stranger is that the characters attack Thursday simply because they are hungry for feeling and emotion. She finally escapes after showing the characters how to feel guilt, enmity, hate, anger and so on, missing from Blyton's world according to Fforde.

On Flanders and Swann's album At the Drop of Another Hat, Michael Flanders introduces his partner Donald Swann, in part, as "the Enid Blyton of English light music."

Pop group The Enid took their name from her.

All her books bore a facsimile of her signature written Enid=Blyton.

Her nephew is the Doctor Who composer Carey Blyton.

See also

• Category:Enid Blyton's books for chronological listings
• Enid Blyton's illustrators

References

File:Biography.jpeg

Enid Blyton Biography

• Enid Blyton (1952) The Story of My Life
• Barbara Stoney (1974) Enid Blyton, 1992 The Enid Blyton Biography, Hodder, London ISBN 0340583487 (paperback) ISBN 0340165146
• S. G. Ray (1982) The Blyton Phenomenon
• Bob Mullan (1987) The Enid Blyton Story
• George Greenfield (1998) Enid Blyton
• Robert Druce (1992) This Day Our Daily Fictions: An Enquiry into the Multi-Million Bestseller Status of Enid Blyton and Ian Fleming

External links

• The Enid Blyton Society
• EnidBlyton.net
• Heather's Blyton Pages
• Enid Blyton Collectors' and Enthusiasts' Guide to First Editions