By: James Aitchison

Enid Blyton’s books have sold more than 600 million copies in more than 90 different languages.  More than a million Famous Five books are still sold worldwide each year.  She published 753 titles over her 45-year career, with an average of 16 titles published each year.  By all accounts, she was the most famous, most prolific, most beloved children’s author of all time.

Arguably, she is also the most controversial author of children’s books ever.  Her writing style has been criticised as simplistic.  Her Noddy character is reviled.  Helena Bonham Carter, who portrayed Blyton in a BBC film, described her as “a complete workaholic, an achievement junkie, and an extremely canny businesswoman … who knew how to brand herself, right down to the famous signature”.

Her incredible output gave rise to rumours that she employed a team of ghost writers — she didn’t — and that all was not sunny in the Blyton household.  One daughter, Imogen, considered her mother “arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct”.  Her eldest daughter Gillian disagreed; “she was a fair and loving mother, and a fascinating companion”.

To this day, the author who gave the world The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Naughtiest Girl, The Magic Faraway Tree, Mr. Galliano’s Circus, Malory Towers and many, many more remains a literary enigma. Certainly, the image of the woman with a portable typewriter on her knees, invites investigation.

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Enid Blyton was born on 11 August 1897 in East Dulwich, South London.  She adored her father Thomas Blyton, a cutlery salesman, who shared his love of gardening, music, painting and literature with his only daughter.  When she turned 13, he left to live with another woman.  The effect on Enid was catastrophic. She grew to despise her mother, Theresa Mary Blyton, who was convinced her daughter’s efforts at writing “a waste of time and money”.  When Enid left home she never saw her mother again and gave the impression she was dead.  Her daughters never met their grandmother.

Blyton trained as a teacher while submitting early manuscripts.  Rejections made her even more determined to become an author.  “It is partly the struggle that helps you so much, that gives you determination, character, self-reliance,” she recalled.  She certainly proved those early editors wrong. Unlike other authors who wrote for only one or two publishers at most, Blyton’s immense output was shared by the Who’s-Who of British publishing at the time: Hodder & Stoughton, Macmillan, Brockhampton, Methuen, Warne, Muller, Blackwell, Newnes, Nelson, Evans, Sampson Low, Collins, Latimer House, Lutterworth, Hamish Hamilton and more.  It was as though she was feeding words into several great machines simultaneously.  At her height, few publishers would have been foolhardy enough to reject an Enid Blyton manuscript! 

Blyton’s first marriage to Major Hugh Pollock in 1924 was marred by betrayal.  Pollock was an editor at publishing house George Newnes.  He started an affair with an aspiring writer nineteen years his junior who would later claim that Blyton had affairs with a children’s nanny and a female artist who illustrated one of her books.  In 1941 Blyton met a London surgeon Kenneth Waters.  When Pollock threatened to expose her affair with Waters and damage her public image, Blyton persuaded Pollock to admit infidelity in exchange for access to their daughters.  He agreed, but after their divorce, Blyton denied him access and saw to it that he never worked in publishing again.  

Her marriage to Waters was a happy one, lasting until his death in 1967.  By that time, Blyton was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.  She died on 28 November 1968, aged 71.

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What accounted for Blyton’s gargantuan — almost superhuman —output?

Her daily routine changed little over the years.  Soon after breakfast she would instruct her cook on the family’s meals, and then start writing on the verandah overlooking the garden or in an armchair by the fire.  Her typewriter was poised on a board over her knees, with her red silk Moroccan shawl close by.  Blyton believed the colour red acted as a “mental stimulus”.  By five o’clock she had usually written between six and ten thousand words with a short break for lunch on a tray.

In 1953 she corresponded with Professor Peter McKellar of New Zealand.  The psychologist had asked Blyton for details of her imagery process and she was happy to comply.

“I shut my eyes for a few minutes, with my portable typewriter on my knee — I make my mind blank and wait — and then, as clearly as I would see real children, my characters stand before me in my mind’s eye.  I see them in detail — hair, eyes, feet, clothes, expression — and I always know their Christian names but never their surname.  I get these out of a telephone directory afterwards”.

Once Blyton’s fingers descended onto the typewriter keys, nothing could stop her.  “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 story is enacted in my mind’s eye almost as if I had a private cinema screen there.  A 3-dimensional screen, complete with sound, smell and taste.  The characters come on and off, talk, laugh, have their adventures … I watch and hear everything, writing it down with my typewriter — reporting the dialogue (which is always completely natural), the expressions on the faces, the feelings of delight, fear and so on.  I don’t know what anyone is going to say or do.  I don’t know what is going to happen …”

Significantly, Charles Dickens and William Wordsworth claimed the “mind’s eye” as their source of creativity.

Blyton also described her “under-mind”, which she believed could receive directions such as “the story must be 40,000 words long”.  Invariably, she said, “The book ends almost to the word”.

Blyton was adamant that she could not plan or plot her stories in advance.  “If I tried to think 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”. 

Her output peaked between 1949 — 1959.  In the early 1950s she was often publishing more than 50 books a year.  Her long-running series continued to dominate the market: by 1955, her fourteenth Famous Five novel, her fifteenth Mary Mouse book, and her seventh Secret Seven tale were published.  She continued to write Biblical stories as well.

By 1962, more than 26 million copies of Noddy had been sold.

Meanwhile, sacks full of letters from children all over the world arrived on her doorsteps.  Blyton managed to reply to all.  

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From the 1950s, critics, parents, educationalists, teachers and librarians questioned Blyton’s literary merit.  Her books were described as “unchallenging” for young readers; they were also branded elitist, sexist, racist and xenophobic.  Her characters were thought to display petty, spiteful, vindictive behaviour towards their adversaries, who were usually of a different nationality or social background to her predominantly middle-class English heroes or heroines.  One critic flinched at the “assumed level of privilege of the children and families in the books”.  Another critic disliked her limited vocabulary; her writing style was “drained of all difficulty until it achieved a kind of aesthetic anaemia”.  Children’s literary critic Margery Fisher went further; she said Blyton’s books were “slow poison”.  Others labelled her work “too mediocre” to mention.

Gender equality in Blyton’s stories proved another issue.  Lines such as “It’s really time you gave up thinking you’re as good as a boy” aroused sexist accusations.

Increasingly — especially in the case of Noddy  — libraries and schools banned her books, and the BBC refused to broadcast her stories.  In fact, as far as the BBC was concerned, she didn’t exist.

Other critics blasted her limited plots and settings as repetitive and “continually recycled”.  

According to one expert, “Enid Blyton has been banned from more public libraries over the years than is the case with any other adult or children’s author”. 

Unperturbed, Blyton replied that she took no notice of critics over twelve years of age.  She claimed that half the attacks on her work were spawned by jealousy, and the other half from “stupid people who don’t know what they’re talking about”.  And, with some justification, she defended her books’ Englishness against an invasion of American culture.

Despite the critics, Blyton’s books remain hugely popular among children in British Commonwealth nations: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.  Recently they achieved a huge surge in popularity in China.

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Enid Blyton remains an enigma.  Hard-working and complex, her publishing legacy is unrivalled while her life was far from idyllic.

In 1969, psychologist Michael Woods arguably summed her up best: “She was a child, she thought as a child and she wrote as a child …”