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Enid Mary Blyton (11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968) was an English children's writer , whose books have been worldwide bestsellers since the 1930s, selling more than 600 million copies. Her books are still enormously popular and have been translated into ninety languages. As of June 2019, Blyton held 4th place for the most translated author. She wrote on a wide range of topics, including education, natural history, fantasy, mystery, and biblical narratives. She is best remembered today for her Noddy , Famous Five , Secret Seven , the Five Find-Outers , and Malory Towers books, although she also wrote many others including the St Clare's , The Naughtiest Girl and The Faraway Tree series.

Her first book, Child Whispers , a 24-page collection of poems, was published in 1922. Following the commercial success of her early novels, such as Adventures of the Wishing-Chair (1937) and The Enchanted Wood (1939), Blyton went on to build a literary empire, sometimes producing fifty books a year, in addition to her prolific magazine and newspaper contributions. Her writing was unplanned and sprang largely from her unconscious mind: she typed her stories as events unfolded before her. The sheer volume of her work and the speed with which she produced it led to rumours that Blyton employed an army of ghost writers , a charge she vigorously denied.

Blyton's work became increasingly controversial among literary critics, teachers, and parents beginning in the 1950s, due to the alleged unchallenging nature of her writing and her themes, particularly in the Noddy series. Some libraries and schools banned her works, and from the 1930s until the 1950s the BBC refused to broadcast her stories because of their perceived lack of literary merit.

She felt she had a responsibility to provide her readers with a strong moral framework, so she encouraged them to support worthy causes. In particular, through the clubs she set up or supported, she encouraged and organised them to raise funds for animal and paediatric charities.

The story of Blyton's life was dramatised in Enid , a BBC television film featuring Helena Bonham Carter in the title role. It was first broadcast in the UK on BBC Four in 2009.

Early life and education

Early writing career, new series: 1934–1948, peak output: 1949–1959, final works, magazine and newspaper contributions, writing style and technique, charitable work, jigsaw puzzle and games, personal life, death and legacy, critical backlash, stage, film and television adaptations.

Enid Blyton was born on 11 August 1897 in East Dulwich, South London, United Kingdom, the eldest of three children, to Thomas Carey Blyton (1870–1920), a cutlery salesman (recorded in the 1911 census with the occupation of "Mantle Manufacturer dealer [in] women's suits, skirts, etc.") and his wife Theresa Mary ( née Harrison; 1874–1950). Enid's younger brothers, Hanly (1899–1983) and Carey (1902–1976), were born after the family had moved to a semi-detached house in Beckenham , then a village in Kent . A few months after her birth, Enid almost died from whooping cough , but was nursed back to health by her father, whom she adored. Thomas Blyton ignited Enid's interest in nature; in her autobiography she wrote that he "loved flowers and birds and wild animals, and knew more about them than anyone I had ever met". He also passed on his interest in gardening, art, music, literature, and theatre, and the pair often went on nature walks, much to the disapproval of Enid's mother, who showed little interest in her daughter's pursuits. Enid was devastated when her father left the family shortly after her 13th birthday to live with another woman. Enid and her mother did not have a good relationship, and Enid did not attend either of her parents' funerals.

From 1907 to 1915, Blyton attended St Christopher's School in Beckenham, where she enjoyed physical activities and became school tennis champion and lacrosse captain. She was not keen on all the academic subjects, but excelled in writing and, in 1911, entered Arthur Mee 's children's poetry competition. Mee offered to print her verses, encouraging her to produce more. Blyton's mother considered her efforts at writing to be a "waste of time and money", but she was encouraged to persevere by Mabel Attenborough, the aunt of school friend Mary Potter .

Blyton's father taught her to play the piano, which she mastered well enough for him to believe she might follow in his sister's footsteps and become a professional musician. Blyton considered enrolling at the Guildhall School of Music , but decided she was better suited to becoming a writer. After finishing school, in 1915, as head girl, she moved out of the family home to live with her friend Mary Attenborough, before going to stay with George and Emily Hunt at Seckford Hall, near Woodbridge , in Suffolk. Seckford Hall, with its allegedly haunted room and secret passageway, provided inspiration for her later writing. At Woodbridge Congregational Church, Blyton met Ida Hunt, who taught at Ipswich High School and suggested she train there as a teacher. Blyton was introduced to the children at the nursery school and, recognising her natural affinity with them, enrolled in a National Froebel Union teacher training course at the school in September 1916. By this time, she had nearly terminated all contact with her family.

Blyton's manuscripts were rejected by publishers on many occasions, which only made her more determined to succeed, saying, "it is partly the struggle that helps you so much, that gives you determination, character, self-reliance –all things that help in any profession or trade, and most certainly in writing." In March 1916, her first poems were published in Nash's Magazine . She completed her teacher training course in December 1918 and, the following month, obtained a teaching appointment at Bickley Park School, a small, independent establishment for boys in Bickley, Kent. Two months later, Blyton received a teaching certificate with distinctions in zoology and principles of education; first class in botany, geography, practice and history of education, child hygiene, and classroom teaching; and second class in literature and elementary mathematics. In 1920, she moved to Southernhay, in Hook Road Surbiton , as nursery governess to the four sons of architect Horace Thompson and his wife Gertrude, with whom Blyton spent four happy years. With the shortage of area schools, neighboring children soon joined her charges, and a small school developed at the house.

In 1920, Blyton moved to Chessington and began writing in her spare time. The following year, she won the Saturday Westminster Review writing competition with her essay "On the Popular Fallacy that to the Pure All Things are Pure". Publications such as The Londoner , Home Weekly and The Bystander began to show an interest in her short stories and poems.

Blyton's first book, Child Whispers , a 24-page collection of poems, was published in 1922. Its illustrator, Enid's schoolfriend Phyllis Chase collaborated on several of her early works. Also in that year, Blyton began writing in annuals for Cassell and George Newnes, and her first piece of writing, "Peronel and his Pot of Glue", was accepted for publication in Teachers' World . Further boosting her success, in 1923, her poems appeared alongside those of Rudyard Kipling , Walter de la Mare , and G. K. Chesterton in a special issue of Teachers' World. Blyton's educational texts were influential in the 1920s and 1930s, with her most sizable being the three-volume The Teacher's Treasury (1926), the six-volume Modern Teaching (1928), the eight-volume Pictorial Knowledge (1930), and the four-volume Modern Teaching in the Infant School (1932).

In July 1923, Blyton published Real Fairies , a collection of thirty-three poems written especially for the book with the exception of "Pretending", which had appeared earlier in Punch magazine. The following year, she published The Enid Blyton Book of Fairies , illustrated by Horace J. Knowles, and in 1926 the Book of Brownies . Several books of plays appeared in 1927, including A Book of Little Plays and The Play's the Thing with the illustrator Alfred Bestall .

In the 1930s, Blyton developed an interest in writing stories related to various myths, including those of ancient Greece and Rome ; The Knights of the Round Table , Tales of Ancient Greece and Tales of Robin Hood were published in 1930. In Tales of Ancient Greece Blyton retold 16 well-known ancient Greek myths, but used the Latin rather than the Greek names of deities and invented conversations between characters. The Adventures of Odysseus , Tales of the Ancient Greeks and Persians and Tales of the Romans followed in 1934.

Commercial success

The first of twenty-eight books in Blyton's Old Thatch series , The Talking Teapot and Other Tales , was published in 1934, the same year as Brer Rabbit Retold ; (note that Brer Rabbit originally featured in Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris ), her first serial story and first full-length book, Adventures of the Wishing-Chair , followed in 1937. The Enchanted Wood , the first book in the Faraway Tree series , published in 1939, is about a magic tree inspired by the Norse mythology that had fascinated Blyton as a child. According to Blyton's daughter Gillian the inspiration for the magic tree came from "thinking up a story one day and suddenly she was walking in the enchanted wood and found the tree. In her imagination she climbed up through the branches and met Moon-Face, Silky, the Saucepan Man and the rest of the characters. She had all she needed." As in the Wishing-Chair series, these fantasy books typically involve children being transported into a magical world in which they meet fairies , goblins , elves , pixies and other mythological creatures.

Blyton's first full-length adventure novel, The Secret Island , was published in 1938, featuring the characters of Jack, Mike, Peggy and Nora. Described by The Glasgow Herald as a " Robinson Crusoe -style adventure on an island in an English lake", The Secret Island was a lifelong favourite of Gillian's and spawned the Secret series . The following year Blyton released her first book in the Circus series and her initial book in the Amelia Jane series, Naughty Amelia Jane! According to Gillian the main character was based on a large handmade doll given to her by her mother on her third birthday.

During the 1940s Blyton became a prolific author, her success enhanced by her "marketing, publicity and branding that was far ahead of its time". In 1940 Blyton published two books – Three Boys and a Circus and Children of Kidillin  – under the pseudonym of Mary Pollock (middle name plus first married name), in addition to the eleven published under her own name that year. So popular were Pollock's books that one reviewer was prompted to observe that "Enid Blyton had better look to her laurels". But Blyton's readers were not so easily deceived and many complained about the subterfuge to her and her publisher, with the result that all six books published under the name of Mary Pollock – two in 1940 and four in 1943 – were reissued under Blyton's name. Later in 1940 Blyton published the first of her boarding school story books and the first novel in the Naughtiest Girl series, The Naughtiest Girl in the School , which followed the exploits of the mischievous schoolgirl Elizabeth Allen at the fictional Whyteleafe School. The first of her six novels in the St. Clare's series, The Twins at St. Clare's , appeared the following year, featuring the twin sisters Patricia and Isabel O'Sullivan.

In 1942 Blyton released the first book in the Mary Mouse series, Mary Mouse and the Dolls' House , about a mouse exiled from her mousehole who becomes a maid at a dolls' house. Twenty-three books in the series were produced between 1942 and 1964; 10,000 copies were sold in 1942 alone. The same year, Blyton published the first novel in the Famous Five series , Five on a Treasure Island , with illustrations by Eileen Soper . Its popularity resulted in twenty-one books between then and 1963, and the characters of Julian, Dick, Anne, George (Georgina) and Timmy the dog became household names in Britain. Matthew Grenby, author of Children's Literature , states that the five were involved with "unmasking hardened villains and solving serious crimes", although the novels were "hardly 'hard-boiled' thrillers". Blyton based the character of Georgina, a tomboy she described as "short-haired, freckled, sturdy, and snub-nosed" and "bold and daring, hot-tempered and loyal", on herself.

Blyton had an interest in biblical narratives, and retold Old and New Testament stories. The Land of Far-Beyond (1942) is a Christian parable along the lines of John Bunyan 's The Pilgrim's Progress (1698), with contemporary children as the main characters. In 1943 she published The Children's Life of Christ , a collection of fifty-nine short stories related to the life of Jesus, with her own slant on popular biblical stories, from the Nativity and the Three Wise Men through to the trial, the crucifixion and the resurrection . Tales from the Bible was published the following year, followed by The Boy with the Loaves and Fishes in 1948.

The first book in Blyton's Five Find-Outers series, The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage , was published in 1943, as was the second book in the Faraway series, The Magic Faraway Tree , which in 2003 was voted 66th in the BBC 's Big Read poll to find the UK's favourite book. Several of Blyton's works during this period have seaside themes; John Jolly by the Sea (1943), a picture book intended for younger readers, was published in a booklet format by Evans Brothers. Other books with a maritime theme include The Secret of Cliff Castle and Smuggler Ben , both attributed to Mary Pollock in 1943; The Island of Adventure , the first in the Adventure series of eight novels from 1944 onwards; and various novels of the Famous Five series such as Five on a Treasure Island (1942), Five on Kirrin Island Again (1947) and Five Go Down to the Sea (1953).

Capitalising on her success, with a loyal and ever-growing readership, Blyton produced a new edition of many of her series such as the Famous Five, the Five Find-Outers and St. Clare's every year in addition to many other novels, short stories and books. In 1946 Blyton launched the first in the Malory Towers series of six books based around the schoolgirl Darrell Rivers, First Term at Malory Towers , which became extremely popular, particularly with girls.

The first book in Blyton's Barney Mysteries series, The Rockingdown Mystery , was published in 1949, as was the first of her fifteen Secret Seven novels. The Secret Seven Society consists of Peter, his sister Janet, and their friends Colin, George, Jack, Pam and Barbara, who meet regularly in a shed in the garden to discuss peculiar events in their local community. Blyton rewrote the stories so they could be adapted into cartoons, which appeared in Mickey Mouse Weekly in 1951 with illustrations by George Brook. The French author Evelyne Lallemand continued the series in the 1970s, producing an additional twelve books, nine of which were translated into English by Anthea Bell between 1983 and 1987.

Blyton's Noddy , about a little wooden boy from Toyland, first appeared in the Sunday Graphic on 5 June 1949, and in November that year Noddy Goes to Toyland , the first of at least two dozen books in the series, was published. The idea was conceived by one of Blyton's publishers, Sampson, Low, Marston and Company, who in 1949 arranged a meeting between Blyton and the Dutch illustrator Harmsen van der Beek . Despite having to communicate via an interpreter, he provided some initial sketches of how Toyland and its characters would be represented. Four days after the meeting Blyton sent the text of the first two Noddy books to her publisher, to be forwarded to van der Beek. The Noddy books became one of her most successful and best-known series, and were hugely popular in the 1950s. An extensive range of sub-series, spin-offs and strip books were produced throughout the decade, including Noddy's Library , Noddy's Garage of Books , Noddy's Castle of Books , Noddy's Toy Station of Books and Noddy's Shop of Books .

In 1950 Blyton established the company Darrell Waters Ltd to manage her affairs. By the early 1950s she had reached the peak of her output, often publishing more than fifty books a year, and she remained extremely prolific throughout much of the decade. By 1955 Blyton had written her fourteenth Famous Five novel, Five Have Plenty of Fun , her fifteenth Mary Mouse book, Mary Mouse in Nursery Rhyme Land , her eighth book in the Adventure series, The River of Adventure , and her seventh Secret Seven novel, Secret Seven Win Through . She completed the sixth and final book of the Malory Towers series, Last Term at Malory Towers , in 1951.

Blyton published several further books featuring the character of Scamp the terrier, following on from The Adventures of Scamp , a novel she had released in 1943 under the pseudonym of Mary Pollock. Scamp Goes on Holiday (1952) and Scamp at School , Scamp and Caroline and Scamp Goes to the Zoo (1954) were illustrated by Pierre Probst. She introduced the character of Bom, a stylish toy drummer dressed in a bright red coat and helmet, alongside Noddy in TV Comic in July 1956. A book series began the same year with Bom the Little Toy Drummer , featuring illustrations by R. Paul-Hoye, and followed with Bom and His Magic Drumstick (1957), Bom Goes Adventuring (1958), Bom and the Clown and Bom and the Rainbow (1959) and Bom Goes to Magic Town (1960). In 1958 she produced two annuals featuring the character, the first of which included twenty short stories, poems and picture strips.

Many of Blyton's series, including Noddy and The Famous Five, continued to be successful in the 1960s; by 1962, 26 million copies of Noddy had been sold. Blyton concluded several of her long-running series in 1963, publishing the last books of The Famous Five ( Five Are Together Again ) and The Secret Seven ( Fun for the Secret Seven ); she also produced three more Brer Rabbit books with the illustrator Grace Lodge: Brer Rabbit Again , Brer Rabbit Book , and Brer Rabbit's a Rascal . In 1962 many of her books were among the first to be published by Armada Books in paperback, making them more affordable to children.

After 1963 Blyton's output was generally confined to short stories and books intended for very young readers, such as Learn to Count with Noddy and Learn to Tell Time with Noddy in 1965, and Stories for Bedtime and the Sunshine Picture Story Book collection in 1966. Her declining health and a falling off in readership among older children have been put forward as the principal reasons for this change in trend. Blyton published her last book in the Noddy series, Noddy and the Aeroplane , in February 1964. In May the following year she published Mixed Bag , a song book with music written by her nephew Carey, and in August she released her last full-length books, The Man Who Stopped to Help and The Boy Who Came Back .

Blyton cemented her reputation as a children's writer when in 1926 she took over the editing of Sunny Stories , a magazine that typically included the re-telling of legends, myths, stories and other articles for children. That same year she was given her own column in Teachers' World , entitled "From my Window". Three years later she began contributing a weekly page in the magazine, in which she published letters from her fox terrier dog Bobs. They proved to be so popular that in 1933 they were published in book form as Letters from Bobs , and sold ten thousand copies in the first week. Her most popular feature was "Round the Year with Enid Blyton", which consisted of forty-eight articles covering aspects of natural history such as weather, pond life, how to plant a school garden and how to make a bird table. Among Blyton's other nature projects was her monthly "Country Letter" feature that appeared in The Nature Lover magazine in 1935.

Sunny Stories was renamed Enid Blyton's Sunny Stories in January 1937, and served as a vehicle for the serialisation of Blyton's books. Her first Naughty Amelia Jane story, about an anti-heroine based on a doll owned by her daughter Gillian, was published in the magazine. Blyton stopped contributing in 1952, and it closed down the following year, shortly before the appearance of the new fortnightly Enid Blyton Magazine written entirely by Blyton. The first edition appeared on 18 March 1953, and the magazine ran until September 1959.

Noddy made his first appearance in the Sunday Graphic in 1949, the same year as Blyton's first daily Noddy strip for the London Evening Standard . It was illustrated by van der Beek until his death in 1953.

Blyton worked in a wide range of fictional genres, from fairy tales to animal, nature, detective, mystery, and circus stories, but she often "blurred the boundaries" in her books, and encompassed a range of genres even in her short stories. In a 1958 article published in The Author , she wrote that there were a "dozen or more different types of stories for children", and she had tried them all, but her favourites were those with a family at their centre.

In another letter to McKellar she describes how in just five days she wrote the 60,000-word book The River of Adventure , the eighth in her Adventure Series , by listening to what she referred to as her "under-mind", which she contrasted with her "upper conscious mind". Blyton was unwilling to conduct any research or planning before beginning work on a new book, which coupled with the lack of variety in her life according to Druce almost inevitably presented the danger that she might unconsciously, and clearly did, plagiarise the books she had read, including her own. Gillian has recalled that her mother "never knew where her stories came from", but that she used to talk about them "coming from her 'mind's eye ' ", as did William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens . Blyton had "thought it was made up of every experience she'd ever had, everything she's seen or heard or read, much of which had long disappeared from her conscious memory" but never knew the direction her stories would take. Blyton further explained in her biography that "If I tried to think out or invent the whole book, I could not do it. For one thing, it would bore me and for another, it would lack the 'verve' and the extraordinary touches and surprising ideas that flood out from my imagination."

Blyton's daily routine varied little over the years. She usually began writing soon after breakfast, with her portable typewriter on her knee and her favourite red Moroccan shawl nearby; she believed that the colour red acted as a "mental stimulus" for her. Stopping only for a short lunch break she continued writing until five o'clock, by which time she would usually have produced 6,000–10,000 words.

A 2000 article in The Malay Mail considers Blyton's children to have "lived in a world shaped by the realities of post-war austerity", enjoying freedom without the political correctness of today, which serves modern readers of Blyton's novels with a form of escapism. Brandon Robshaw of The Independent refers to the Blyton universe as "crammed with colour and character", "self-contained and internally consistent", noting that Blyton exemplifies a strong mistrust of adults and figures of authority in her works, creating a world in which children govern. Gillian noted that in her mother's adventure, detective and school stories for older children, "the hook is the strong storyline with plenty of cliffhangers, a trick she acquired from her years of writing serialised stories for children's magazines. There is always a strong moral framework in which bravery and loyalty are (eventually) rewarded". Blyton herself wrote that "my love of children is the whole foundation of all my work".

Victor Watson, Assistant Director of Research at Homerton College, Cambridge , believes that Blyton's works reveal an "essential longing and potential associated with childhood", and notes how the opening pages of The Mountain of Adventure present a "deeply appealing ideal of childhood". He argues that Blyton's work differs from that of many other authors in its approach, describing the narrative of The Famous Five series for instance as "like a powerful spotlight, it seeks to illuminate, to explain, to demystify. It takes its readers on a roller-coaster story in which the darkness is always banished; everything puzzling, arbitrary, evocative is either dismissed or explained". Watson further notes how Blyton often used minimalist visual descriptions and introduced a few careless phrases such as "gleamed enchantingly" to appeal to her young readers.

From the mid-1950s rumours began to circulate that Blyton had not written all the books attributed to her, a charge she found particularly distressing. She published an appeal in her magazine asking children to let her know if they heard such stories and, after one mother informed her that she had attended a parents' meeting at her daughter's school during which a young librarian had repeated the allegation, Blyton decided in 1955 to begin legal proceedings. The librarian was eventually forced to make a public apology in open court early the following year, but the rumours that Blyton operated "a 'company' of ghost writers" persisted, as some found it difficult to believe that one woman working alone could produce such a volume of work.

Enid's Conservative personal politics were often in view in her fiction. In The Mystery of the Missing Necklace (a The Five Find-Outers installment), she uses the character of young Elizabeth ("Bets") to give a statement praising Winston Churchill and describing the politician as a "statesman".

Blyton felt a responsibility to provide her readers with a positive moral framework, and she encouraged them to support worthy causes. Her view, expressed in a 1957 article, was that children should help animals and other children rather than adults:

Blyton and the members of the children's clubs she promoted via her magazines raised a great deal of money for various charities; according to Blyton, membership of her clubs meant "working for others, for no reward". The largest of the clubs she was involved with was the Busy Bees, the junior section of the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals, which Blyton had actively supported since 1933. The club had been set up by Maria Dickin in 1934, and after Blyton publicised its existence in the Enid Blyton Magazine it attracted 100,000 members in three years. Such was Blyton's popularity among children that after she became Queen Bee in 1952 more than 20,000 additional members were recruited in her first year in office. The Enid Blyton Magazine Club was formed in 1953. Its primary objective was to raise funds to help those children with cerebral palsy who attended a centre in Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, London, by furnishing an on-site hostel among other things.

The Famous Five series gathered such a following that readers asked Blyton if they might form a fan club. She agreed, on condition that it serve a useful purpose, and suggested that it could raise funds for the Shaftesbury Society Babies' Home in Beaconsfield, on whose committee she had served since 1948. The club was established in 1952, and provided funds for equipping a Famous Five Ward at the home, a paddling pool , sun room, summer house, playground, birthday and Christmas celebrations, and visits to the pantomime. By the late 1950s Blyton's clubs had a membership of 500,000, and raised £35,000 in the six years of the Enid Blyton Magazine' s run.

By 1974 the Famous Five Club had a membership of 220,000, and was growing at the rate of 6,000 new members a year. The Beaconsfield home it was set up to support closed in 1967, but the club continued to raise funds for other paediatric charities, including an Enid Blyton bed at Great Ormond Street Hospital and a mini-bus for disabled children at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.

Blyton capitalised upon her commercial success as an author by negotiating agreements with jigsaw puzzle and games manufacturers from the late 1940s onwards; by the early 1960s some 146 different companies were involved in merchandising Noddy alone. In 1948 Bestime released four jigsaw puzzles featuring her characters, and the first Enid Blyton board game appeared, Journey Through Fairyland , created by BGL. The first card game, Faraway Tree, appeared from Pepys in 1950. In 1954 Bestime released the first four jigsaw puzzles of the Secret Seven, and the following year a Secret Seven card game appeared.

Bestime released the Little Noddy Car Game in 1953 and the Little Noddy Leap Frog Game in 1955, and in 1956 American manufacturer Parker Brothers released Little Noddy's Taxi Game, a board game which features Noddy driving about town, picking up various characters. Bestime released its Plywood Noddy Jigsaws series in 1957 and a Noddy jigsaw series featuring cards appeared from 1963, with illustrations by Robert Lee. Arrow Games became the chief producer of Noddy jigsaws in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Whitman manufactured four new Secret Seven jigsaw puzzles in 1975, and produced four new Malory Towers ones two years later. In 1979 the company released a Famous Five adventure board game, Famous Five Kirrin Island Treasure. Stephen Thraves wrote eight Famous Five adventure game books, published by Hodder & Stoughton in the 1980s. The first adventure game book of the series, The Wreckers' Tower Game , was published in October 1984.

On 28 August 1924, Blyton married Major Hugh Alexander Pollock, DSO (1888–1971) at Bromley Register Office, without inviting her family. They married shortly after his divorce from his first wife, with whom he had two sons, one of them already deceased. Pollock was editor of the book department in the publishing firm George Newnes, which became Blyton's regular publisher. It was he who requested her to write a book about animals, resulting in The Zoo Book , completed in the month before their marriage. They initially lived in a flat in Chelsea before moving to Elfin Cottage in Beckenham in 1926 and then to Old Thatch in Bourne End (called Peterswood in her books) in 1929. Blyton's first daughter, Gillian, was born on 15 July 1931, and, after a miscarriage in 1934, she gave birth to a second daughter, Imogen, on 27 October 1935.

In 1938, she and her family moved to a house in Beaconsfield , named Green Hedges by Blyton's readers, following a competition in her magazine. Pollock and Blyton split in 1941 and later divorced.

Blyton married Kenneth Fraser Darrell Waters, a London surgeon, at the City of Westminster Register Office on 20 October 1943. She changed the surname of her daughters to Darrell Waters and publicly embraced her new role as a happily married and devoted doctor's wife.

Blyton's health began to deteriorate in 1957, when, during a round of golf, she started to feel faint and breathless, and, by 1960, she was displaying signs of dementia . Her agent, George Greenfield, recalled that it was "unthinkable" for the "most famous and successful of children's authors with her enormous energy and computerlike memory" to be losing her mind and suffering from what is now known as Alzheimer's disease in her mid-60s. Worsening Blyton's situation was her husband's declining health throughout the 1960s; he suffered from severe arthritis in his neck and hips, deafness, and became increasingly ill-tempered and erratic until his death on 15 September 1967.

The story of Blyton's life was dramatised in a BBC film entitled Enid , which aired in the United Kingdom on BBC Four on 16 November 2009, starring Helena Bonham Carter .

During the months following her husband's death, Blyton became increasingly ill and moved into a nursing home three months before her death. She died in her sleep of Alzheimer's disease at the Greenways Nursing Home, Hampstead, North London, on 28 November 1968, aged 71. A memorial service was held at St James's Church, Piccadilly and she was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, where her ashes remain. Blyton's home, Green Hedges, was auctioned on 26 May 1971 and demolished in 1973; the site is now occupied by houses and a street named Blyton Close. An English Heritage blue plaque commemorates Blyton at Hook Road in Chessington , where she lived from 1920 to 1924. In 2014, a plaque recording her time as a Beaconsfield resident from 1938 until her death in 1968 was unveiled in the town hall gardens, next to small iron figures of Noddy and Big Ears.

Since her death and the publication of her daughter Imogen's 1989 autobiography, A Childhood at Green Hedges , Blyton has emerged as an emotionally immature, unstable and often malicious figure. Imogen considered her mother to be "arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct. As a child, I viewed her as a rather strict authority. As an adult I pitied her." Blyton's eldest daughter Gillian remembered her rather differently however, as "a fair and loving mother, and a fascinating companion".

The Enid Blyton Trust for Children was established in 1982, with Imogen as its first chairman, and in 1985 it established the National Library for the Handicapped Child. Enid Blyton's Adventure Magazine began publication in September 1985 and, on 14 October 1992, the BBC began publishing Noddy Magazine and released the Noddy CD-Rom in October 1996.

The first Enid Blyton Day was held at Rickmansworth on 6 March 1993 and, in October 1996, the Enid Blyton award, The Enid, was given to those who have made outstanding contributions towards children. The Enid Blyton Society was formed in early 1995, to provide "a focal point for collectors and enthusiasts of Enid Blyton" through its thrice-annual Enid Blyton Society Journal , its annual Enid Blyton Day and its website. On 16 December 1996, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary about Blyton, Secret Lives . To celebrate her centenary in 1997, exhibitions were put on at the London Toy & Model Museum (now closed), Hereford and Worcester County Museum and Bromley Library and, on 9 September, the Royal Mail issued centenary stamps.

The London-based entertainment and retail company Trocadero plc purchased Blyton's Darrell Waters Ltd in 1995 for £14.6 million and established a subsidiary, Enid Blyton Ltd, to handle all intellectual properties, character brands and media in Blyton's works. The group changed its name to Chorion in 1998 but, after financial difficulties in 2012, sold its assets. Hachette UK acquired from Chorion world rights in the Blyton estate in March 2013, including The Famous Five series but excluding the rights to Noddy, which had been sold to DreamWorks Classics (formerly Classic Media, now a subsidiary of DreamWorks Animation) in 2012.

Blyton's granddaughter, Sophie Smallwood, wrote a new Noddy book to celebrate the character's 60th birthday, 46 years after the last book was published; Noddy and the Farmyard Muddle (2009) was illustrated by Robert Tyndall. In February 2011, the manuscript of a previously unknown Blyton novel, Mr Tumpy's Caravan , was discovered by the archivist at Seven Stories , National Centre for Children's Books in a collection of papers belonging to Blyton's daughter Gillian, purchased by Seven Stories in 2010 following her death. It was initially thought to belong to a comic strip collection of the same name published in 1949, but it appears to be unrelated and is believed to be something written in the 1930s, which had been rejected by a publisher.

In a 1982 survey of 10,000 eleven-year-old children, Blyton was voted their most popular writer. She is the world's fourth most-translated author, behind Agatha Christie , Jules Verne and William Shakespeare with her books being translated into 90 languages. From 2000 to 2010, Blyton was listed as a Top Ten author, selling almost 8 million copies (worth £31.2 million) in the UK alone. In 2003, The Magic Faraway Tree was voted 66th in the BBC's Big Read. In the 2008 Costa Book Awards, Blyton was voted Britain's best-loved author. Her books continue to be very popular among children in Commonwealth nations such as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malta, New Zealand and Australia, and around the world. They have also seen a surge of popularity in China, where they are "big with every generation". In March 2004, Chorion and the Chinese publisher Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press negotiated an agreement over the Noddy franchise, which included bringing the character to an animated series on television, with a potential audience of a further 95 million children under the age of five. Chorion spent around £10 million digitising Noddy and, as of 2002, had made television agreements with at least 11 countries worldwide.

Novelists influenced by Blyton include the crime writer Denise Danks, whose fictional detective Georgina Powers is based on George from the Famous Five. Peter Hunt 's A Step off the Path (1985) is also influenced by the Famous Five, and the St. Clare's and Malory Towers series provided the inspiration for Jacqueline Wilson 's Double Act (1996) and Adèle Geras 's Egerton Hall trilogy (1990–92) respectively. Blyton was important to Stieg Larsson . "The series Stieg Larsson most often mentioned were the Famous Five and the Adventure books."

Blyton's range of plots and settings has been described as limited, repetitive and continually recycled. Many of her books were critically assessed by teachers and librarians, deemed unfit for children to read, and removed from syllabuses and public libraries. Responding to claims that her moral views were "dependably predictable", Blyton commented that "most of you could write down perfectly correctly all the things that I believe in and stand for – you have found them in my books, and a writer's books are always a faithful reflection of himself".

From the 1930s to the 1950s the BBC operated a de facto ban on dramatising Blyton's books for radio, considering her to be a "second-rater" whose work was without literary merit. Blyton's response to her critics was that she was uninterested in the views of anyone over the age of 12, stating that half the attacks on her work were motivated by jealousy and the rest came from "people who don't know what they're talking about because they've never read any of my books".

Despite criticism by contemporaries that her work's quality began to suffer in the 1950s at the expense of its increasing volume, Blyton nevertheless capitalised on being generally regarded at the time as "a more 'savoury', English alternative" to what some considered an "invasion" of Britain by American culture, in the form of "rock music, horror comics, television, teenage culture, delinquency, and Disney ".

In 1954 Blyton adapted Noddy for the stage, producing the Noddy in Toyland pantomime in just two or three weeks. The production was staged at the 2660-seat Stoll Theatre in Kingsway , London at Christmas. Its popularity resulted in the show running during the Christmas season for five or six years. Blyton was delighted with its reception by children in the audience, and attended the theatre three or four times a week. TV adaptations of Noddy since 1954 include one in the 1970s narrated by Richard Briers . In 1955 a stage play based on the Famous Five was produced, and in January 1997 the King's Head Theatre embarked on a six-month tour of the UK with The Famous Five Musical , to commemorate Blyton's centenary. On 21 November 1998 The Secret Seven Save the World was first performed at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff.

There have also been several film and television adaptations of the Famous Five: by the Children's Film Foundation in 1957 and 1964, Southern Television in 1978–79 , and Zenith Productions in 1995–97 . The series was also adapted for the German film Fünf Freunde , directed by Mike Marzuk and released in 2011.

The Comic Strip, a group of British comedians, produced two extreme parodies of the Famous Five for Channel 4 television: Five Go Mad in Dorset , broadcast in 1982, and Five Go Mad on Mescalin , broadcast the following year. A third in the series, Five Go to Rehab , was broadcast on Sky in 2012.

Blyton's The Faraway Tree series of books has also been adapted to television and film. On 29 September 1997 the BBC began broadcasting an animated series called The Enchanted Lands , based on the series. It was announced in October 2014 that a deal had been signed with publishers Hachette for "The Faraway Tree" series to be adapted into a live-action film by director Sam Mendes ' production company. Marlene Johnson, head of children's books at Hachette, said: "Enid Blyton was a passionate advocate of children's storytelling, and The Magic Faraway Tree is a fantastic example of her creative imagination."

Blyton's Malory Towers has been adapted into a musical of the same name by Emma Rice's theatre company. It was scheduled to do a UK spring tour in 2020 which has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic .

In 2019, Malory Towers was adapted as a 13 part TV series for the BBC. It is made partly in Toronto and partly in the UK in association with Canada's Family Channel. The series went to air in the UK from April 2020.

Seven Stories , the National Centre for Children's Books in Newcastle upon Tyne , holds the largest public collection of Blyton's papers and typescripts. The Seven Stories collection contains a significant number of Blyton's typescripts, including the previously unpublished novel, Mr Tumpy's Caravan , as well as personal papers and diaries. The purchase of the material in 2010 was made possible by special funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund , the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund , and two private donations.

• Enid Blyton bibliography
• Enid Blyton Society
• Enid Blyton's illustrators
• This page was last modified on 8 June 2024, at 08:26. Suggest an edit .

Local Histories

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A Brief Biography of Enid Blyton

By Tim Lambert

Enid Blyton was a famous writer of children’s books. Enid was born on 11 August 1897 in East Dulwich, London. Her father, Thomas Blyton was a salesman. Her mother was called Theresa. Enid had two younger brothers. Unfortunately in 1910, her father left the family for another woman.

From 1907 Enid went to St Christopher’s School for Girls in Beckenham. She was musically talented. Enid left school in 1915 and went to Woodbridge, Suffolk. She decided to become a teacher and started a training course at Ipswich High School in 1916. Enid Blyton began teaching a Bickley Park School in 1919. In 1920 she moved to Surbiton and became governess to four boys of a couple called Thompson.

Enid began writing in her spare time and she had poems, stories, and articles published in magazines. Her first book was published in 1922. It was a book of poems called Child Whispers.

Enid Blyton married Major Hugh Alexander Pollock on 28 August 1924. Afterward, she became a full-time writer. Enid was a prolific writer. Meanwhile, she had 2 daughters, Gillian born in 1931, and Imogen Mary born in 1935. Sadly the marriage was not happy and in 1941 Enid began an affair with a surgeon named Darrell Waters. Enid and Pollock divorced and she married Darrell Waters on 20 October 1943.

Meanwhile, Enid continued to write books and articles for magazines. The famous five first appeared in 1942 in a book called Five on a Treasure Island. In 1946 she published the first of 6 books about a schoolgirl called Darrell Rivers. It was called First Term at Malory Towers. Noddy first appeared in a book called Noddy Goes to Toyland published in 1949. The first of a series of books about The Secret Seven was also published in 1949.

In the 1950s books by Enid Blyton were hugely popular. She continued to write into the 1960s but eventually, her health failed. Enid Blyton died on 28 November 1968. She was cremated. However, her books and the characters she created remain popular.

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12 Enid Blyton Facts

Here are some facts about the British children’s writer, Enid Blyton.

• Enid Blyton was born on 11th August 1897 in East Dulwich, London.
• Her father moved away when she was a child, and Enid Blyton had a difficult relationship with her mother. She didn’t attend either her mother’s or father’s funeral.
• Enid Blyton went to St Christopher’s School in Beckenham – she was head girl. She enjoyed most of the lessons, except maths.
• She went on to train as a teacher at Ipswich High School.
• Enid Blyton’s first published book was Child Whispers . It was a book of poetry and came out in 1922 She was still working as a teacher at this point, and wrote in her spare time.
• In August 1924, Enid Blyton married Major Hugh Alexander Pollock. He was the editor at the publishing house George Newnes, and he published some of Enid’s books.
• Enid Blyton was an incredibly prolific writer. She produced many children’s books and series, the most fomous of which are: The Famous Five series, The Adventure series, The Mystery series, The Secret Seven series, The Magic Faraway Tree, The Noddy books, The Malory Towers series and many, many more.
• Her books have sold more than 600 million copies.
• Enid Blyton sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Mary Pollock.
• Despite being a well-loved writer, it seems that Enid Blyton wasn’t a very pleasant person. She cheated on her husband, and when they were going through a divorce she tried to stop him seeing their children. Her daughter, Imogen, said Enid Blyton was “arrogant, insecure and pretentious”.
• Enid Blyton died on 28th November 1968. She was 71 years old. She was cremated and her ashes are held at Golders Green Crematorium.
• Enid Blyton wrote her books on a typewriter perched on her lap. She claimed that she didn’t plan her stories in advance, allowing her imagination to take her from the beginning of a book to the final scene. She was able to write 10,000 words of publishable story in one day!

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Literary Ladies Guide

An archive dedicated to classic women authors and their work, enid blyton, prolific & controversial children’s book author, by elodie barnes | on october 24, 2023 | updated january 28, 2024 | comments (0).

Enid Blyton (August 11, 1897 – November 28, 1968) was a prolific British writer of children’s stories. Her most famous books include The Famous Five   and Secret Seven series, The Faraway Tree , and the Noddy books.

It is estimated that she wrote some seven hundred books, along with hundreds of short stories, magazine articles, and poems.

Blyton’s work is controversial for its sometimes dated and offensive views, yet decades after her death she remains one of the most popular children’s authors in the world.

Early life and education

Enid Mary Blyton was born in East Dulwich, London. She had two younger brothers, Hanly and Carey

Her father, Thomas, was a clothing wholesaler. She had a close and loving relationship with him, sharing his love of the outdoors, the theatre, art, music, and literature. In her 1952 autobiography, The Story of My Life , she describes her father’s willingness to take her for walks, writing that they were:

“… marvelous to me. It’s the very best way of learning about nature if you can go for walks with someone who really knows,” and recalled these times as “the happiest times, when looking back it seems the days were always warm and sunny and the skies were deeply blue.”

Her mother, Theresa, was a housewife. Enid’s relationship with her was more difficult, partly because her mother didn’t share the love of art and the outdoors and resented how Thomas encouraged Enid to spend time on these pursuits. Instead, she expected Enid to help with housework.

Shortly after Enid was born, the family moved to Beckenham in Kent. It was here that Enid went to school, initially to a small school run by two sisters in a house called Tresco, and then later to St. Christopher’s School for Girls, where she was Head Girl in her final two years. She was, by all accounts, bright and popular, and excelled at art and literature.

Despite her warm relationship with her father, Enid’s home life, wasn’t so happy. Her parents’ marriage was full of anger and frustration. When Enid was not quite thirteen her father announced that he was leaving. He moved out and took up residence with another woman, Florence Agnes Delattre.

Since separation and divorce were considered scandalous at the time, especially in the conventional English Kent countryside, Theresa forced Enid and her brothers to pretend that their father was simply away for a short while. This pretense, which the family kept up for years, had a lasting effect on Enid, who took her father’s departure as a rejection of her personally.

With the atmosphere at home strained, she spent more and more time writing in her room. Her mother despaired of her efforts at writing, which were rarely published and which she deemed a waste of time.

Teaching, and a writer’s beginnings

It was assumed Enid would attend music college and become a professional musician like her aunt (her father’s sister, May Crossland). However, feeling that her talents lay in writing, she determined to train as a teacher instead, where she would be in constant contact with children — her future audience of readers.

In September 1916, she enrolled in a teacher training course at Ipswich High School. It was around this time that she broke ties completely with her mother, spending holidays with friends rather than returning home. Although she kept in touch with her father, she was never able to accept his new family, and they were never as close as they once were.

After completing her teacher training in December 1918, Enid taught for a year at a boys’ school in Kent before becoming a governess to four young boys in Surbiton, Surrey. She remained there for four years, and later said it was “one of the happiest times of my life” despite the death of her father in 1920 from a stroke.

By the early 1920s, Enid was also beginning to have some success with her writing. Stories and articles were accepted for publication in various magazines, and she also wrote verses for greeting cards. By 1923 she had written and published more than a hundred stories, reviews, and poems.

Marriage and family life

On August 28, 1924, Enid married Hugh Alexander Pollock, an editor at the publishing company George Newnes. The wedding took place at Bromley Register Office, with neither Enid’s family nor Hugh’s family in attendance.

The couple honeymooned in Jersey. Later, Enid would base Kirrin Island (one of the places in the Famous Five series) on this island experience.

The early years of the marriage were happy and serene, spent mostly at Elfin Cottage in Beckenham. Hugh was supportive of Enid’s work and instrumental in publishing her stories at Newnes. In 1927, he also persuaded her to begin using a typewriter; before that, she had written all her stories in longhand.

In 1929 they moved to Old Thatch, a 16 th -century thatched cottage in Bourne End, Buckinghamshire, very close to the River Thames. Enid described it as “a house in a fairy tale” and with the large gardens was able to indulge her passion for pets (which she had never been allowed as a child). At various times there were dogs, cats, hedgehogs, goldfish, pigeons, hens, and ducks roaming around the grounds.

In July 1931, the couple had a daughter, Gillian. After a miscarriage in 1934, a second daughter, Imogen, was born in October 1935.

Neither Enid nor Hugh spent much time with the children. Enid was busy with her writing and relied on domestic help for things like gardening, childcare, and cooking. Hugh had been working with Winston Churchill on his writings about World War I. He increasingly fell into depression as he realized how close the world was to entering another war.

Hugh began to drink, doing so while hiding in a cupboard underneath the stairs, and Enid retreated ever further into her writing. Her only real friend and confidante was Dorothy Richards, a maternity nurse who had helped with Imogen’s birth.

In August 1938, perhaps thinking that a move would help to give the family a chance, Enid bought a new house in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire — a much larger, newer eight-bedroom house, designed in a mockTudor style, which she called Green Hedges.

Second marriage

During the war years, Enid continued to write, while Hugh rejoined his old regiment, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, and was sent to Dorking in Surrey to train new officers. The separation put another strain on the marriage. While on holiday with Dorothy in Devon in 1941, Enid met Kenneth Waters, a surgeon.

In 1942, she and Hugh were divorced, and she married Kenneth in the City of Westminster Register Office in October 1943. Although she had promised that Hugh would be able to see his two daughters after the divorce, she went back on her word inexplicably, and the two girls never saw their father again.

In The Story of My Life , photographs of the family include Enid, Kenneth, Gillian, and Imogen. There is no mention of Hugh at all — as if he’d never existed.

Enid and Kenneth were largely happy together, but later, Enid’s daughters would each have very different recollections of their childhood and their mother.

In an interview with the author Gyles Brandreth, Gillian said that Enid could “communicate with children in a quite remarkable way… She was a fair and loving mother and a fascinating companion.”

Imogen, on the other hand, while acknowledging that “what [Enid] did as a writer was brilliant,” remembered her mother as “arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct.”

The family spent most of their holidays in Dorset, where they bought a farm in the 1950s, Manor Farm in Stourton Caundle. This setting provided much of the inspiration for the Famous Five books later on.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Making a successful career

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Enid worked mostly on educational books. She began writing and editing a fortnightly magazine, Sunny Stories for Little Folks and published her first full-length novel, The Enid Blyton Book of Bunnies (later renamed The Adventures of Binkle and Flip ) in 1925.

By the 1940s she had given up much of her magazine writing and was concentrating on books. Her first full-length novel for children, The Secret Island , was published in 1938 and became the start of a series.

While her daughters were at boarding school, she began most of what would become her most famous series of books, such as The Famous Five books, the Adventure series, the St Clare’s series, the Faraway Tree , and the Wishing Chair series.

Later, these would be joined by the Secret Seven series, Malory Towers , and the Six Cousins books. Often Enid would publish up to twenty books in a single year.

1949 saw the appearance of the first Noddy book, Noddy Goes to Toyland , about a little wooden boy and his companion, Big Ears. It was the first of at least two dozen books in the same series that was enormously popular during the 1950s, with an extensive range of spin-offs, comic strips, and merchandise.

In 1950, she established a company, Darrell Waters Ltd. (taking Kenneth’s middle and last names) to deal with the financial and business side of things. Her prolific output remained constant, and by 1955 she had published the fourteenth Famous Five novel ( Five Have Plenty of Fun ), the eighth book in the Adventure series ( The River of Adventure ), and the seventh Secret Seven novel ( Secret Seven Win Through ).

Enid intended her books and stories for a wide range of ages, children between the ages of two and fourteen. She wrote adventure and mystery stories, school stories, animal stories, fantasy, fairytales, and nursery stories. Altogether, it’s estimated that she wrote about 700 books for children and about 2,000 short stories, as well as poems and magazine articles.

In a letter to the psychologist Peter McKellar, Enid described her writing technique:

“I shut my eyes for a few minutes, with my portable typewriter on my knee — I make my mind a blank … and then, as clearly as I would see real children, my characters stand before me … The first sentence comes straight into my mind, I don’t have to think of it — I don’t have to think of anything.”

The sheer volume of writings that she produced led to rumors that she employed an army of ghostwriters, a charge that she vehemently denied and that she eventually took legal action on.

She believed her stories came from her “under-mind” as opposed to her conscious mind, although her daughter Gillian also said that it was important for Enid to give her young readers a “strong moral framework in which bravery and loyalty are (eventually) rewarded.

Charity work

In 1953 Enid launched an eponymous fortnightly magazine, Enid Blyton’s Magazine . She wrote all the contents herself, except for paid advertisements, and the magazine launched four clubs that readers could join: the Busy Bees (which raised money for the PDSA pet charity), the Famous Five club (which raised money for a children’s home), the Sunbeam Society (which helped blind children) and the Magazine Club (which helped children with cerebral palsy).

The magazine folded in 1959, but in those six years, the clubs had a total of around half a million members and had raised about £35,000 (almost £1.5 million today).

When the Present Clashes with the Past: Reminiscences of Enid Blyton . . . . . . . . . . .

Controversy and criticism

Despite Enid’s popularity, she was not without her critics. Many teachers and parents (along with literary critics) were dismissive of her work even at the time it was published, saying that it didn’t challenge young readers enough and that its literary merit was limited.

Later, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when a more progressive society was beginning to emerge, her books were also criticized for being elitist, sexist, racist, and xenophobic. They were banned by many libraries and schools that removed them from shelves.  The children’s book critic Margery Fisher likened Enid’s books to “slow poison.”

These accusations have grown over the years. According to the academic Nicholas Tucker, Enid’s works have been “ banned from more public libraries over the years than is the case with any other adult or children’s author.”

From the 1930s until the 1950s, the BBC refused to broadcast her stories : Jean Sutcliffe of the BBC Schools Broadcast department wrote that Enid’s books were “mediocre material” that were churned out too fast, and that “her capacity to do so amounts to genius … anyone else would have died of boredom long ago.”

Not long ago, some revisions were made to modernize some of the language in Enid Blyton books , notably the Famous Five series. These revisions proved to be a flop, and the original language was restoreed. 

Final years

By the time that Enid Blyton’s Magazine ended, she was writing less and spending more time with Kenneth, who had retired as a surgeon in 1957. He suffered from arthritis, and the medicine he took damaged his kidneys. He died in 1967, while Enid herself was struggling with poor physical health. She had experienced bouts of breathlessness, had suffered a heart attack, and descended into dementia.

Enid continued to live at Green Hedges, cared for by staff, until this was no longer possible. She was transferred to a Hampstead nursing home in the summer of 1968. She died in her sleep on November 28, 1968, and was cremated at Golders Green in North London.

Her home, Green Hedges, was demolished in 1973, and the street of houses built on the site is called Blyton Close. In 2014, a plaque commemorating her time living in Beaconsfield was unveiled in the town hall gardens, along with small statues of Noddy and Big Ears.

Enid Blyton’s legacy

The majority of Enid’s books are still in print, with sales of more than 500 million copies. Her works have been translated into some ninety languages.

Several of her series have been continued by other authors, and some have been successfully adapted for television, film, and the stage, including Malory Towers, The Famous Five, Noddy , and The Faraway Tree .

Her life was itself the subject of a BBC film, broadcast in 2009, starring Helena Bonham Carter in the title role.

However, many of her books have also been heavily edited in recent years to remove offensive terms about race, appearance, and class. The criticism that she faced at the time of publication is even stronger today.

In 2016, the Royal Mint blocked a proposal to honor Enid Blyton with a commemorative 50p coin owing to her reconsideration as a “racist, a sexist and a homophobe.” It’s a conflicting legacy for the writer who introduced — and continues to introduce — generations of children to the joys of reading.

Today, the bulk of Enid’s collection of manuscripts and papers is held by the Seven Stories National Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle upon Tyne.

The Enid Blyton Society  was formed in 1995. It issues the Enid Blyton Society Journal three times a year, holds an annual Enid Blyton Day, and has a comprehensive website which delves into the different series of books and includes forums and quizzes.

Contributed by Elodie Barnes . Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online   and is included in the  Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology  published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at  Lucy Writers Platform , she is also co-facilitating  What the Water Gave Us , an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at   Elodie Rose Barnes . 

More about Enid Blyton

 On this site

• When the Present Clashes with the Past: Reminiscences of Enid Blyton
• Enid Blyton’s Top 5 Series

Major works

Almost all of Enid Blyton’s books for children are still in print (although many have been edited from the original versions). See a complete bibliography here .

Biographies

• Enid Blyton: The Biography by Barbara Stoney (2006)
• 101 Amazing Facts About Enid Blyton by Jack Goldstein (2020)
• Enid Blyton: A Literary Life by Andrew Maunder (2021)
• The Real Enid Blyton by Nadia Cohen (2022)

Controversy

• Why it’s Important to Note Enid Blyton’s Failings, Not Erase Her Work
• Enid Blyton Fans React to ‘Racist’ Label
• Enid Blyton: Heritage Bosses Respond to Racism, etc.
• English Heritage Has No Plans to Remove Plaque

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Enid Blyton

• Born August 11 , 1897 · East Dulwich, London, England, UK
• Died November 28 , 1968 · Hampstead, London, England, UK (Alzheimer's disease)
• Birth name Enid Mary Blyton
• Enid Blyton (11 August 1897 - 28 November 1968) was an English author. She was born in Dulwich, South London, England. She was one of the world's most famous children's writers. She is also one of the most prolific authors of all time. This means that she wrote a great number of books. Her most famous stories are the Famous Five stories, about a group of four children (Dick, Julian, Anne, and Georgina, who wanted to be called George) and their dog (Timmy) who have many adventures, and her Noddy books for small children. Her parents wanted her to become a concert pianist (someone who plays the piano), but Enid wanted to be a teacher. Her parents agreed to let her train as a teacher. She began teaching in 1919 in Kent, not far from where she grew up in Beckenham. As a child and teenager her main interest had been writing poems, stories and other items. She had sent many of them to magazines but had never had any published. As she worked as a teacher she began to have her articles, about children and education printed in a magazine called Teachers' World. Her first book, called Child Whispers came out in 1922. It was a book of her poems with illustrations. She was married soon after. She left teaching and began to have more success with her books. She wrote in and was the editor of magazine for children called Sunny Stories. The stories she wrote for this magazine were so popular that the magazine was then called Enid Blyton's Sunny Stories. The magazine came out every two weeks. Many of Enid's most famous books were first printed in this magazine in parts. Enid Blyton has been in The Guinness Book of Records as one of the world's biggest selling writers. She is also included because she wrote more books than almost any other writer (about 700). Her books were published in many different languages. She said that she found writing them easy. In the last few years of her life she had a disease which damaged her mind, called presenile dementia. Her books still sell in large numbers, and used to be owned by her family. A few years ago her family sold them, and now her works belong to a private company. Enid Blyton did a lot of work for charity and had a club for children which helped them to give money to charity. She was married twice and had two daughters. She died of Alzheimer's disease in Hampstead, London. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous
• Spouses Kenneth Darrell Waters (October 20, 1943 - September 15, 1967) (his death) Hugh Pollock (August 28, 1924 - 1942) (divorced, 2 children)
• Mother of Gillian Mary (b. 15th July 1931, d. June 24th 2007) and Imogen Mary (b. 27th October 1935).
• Sister of Hanly Blyton (b. 1899) and Carey Blyton (b. 1902).
• Daughter of Thomas Carey Blyton (1870-1920) and Theresa Mary Hamilton (1874-1950).
• Enid Blyton is the most successful and prolific British children's books author. Her books have been translated into many languages. Blyton wrote within 5 decades more than 700 children's books. Among them the Famous Five series of books, the Adventures series, Malory Towers series and the Five Find Outers & Dog series are very successful.
• The Secret Seven were a famous creation of Blyton's.
• If one can judge from the letters that I receive, it would seem that there are many thousands of children who would like me to speak or to read to them.
• I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most.
• I get over a hundred letters a day from all over the world, from children and parents, and it's a wonder I ever have time to write books, let alone speak!
• I am not really much interested in talking to adults, although I suppose practically every mother in the kingdom knows my name and my books. It's their children I love.
• Writing for children is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.

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Enid Blyton : the biography

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