Not all of the writer’s heroines were on the right side of the law, and, as the title suggests, Amelia Jane is a mischievous presence, playing tricks and cruel pranks on the other toys in the nursery. While Blyton is seldom praised for her psychological insights, the intrigue between the students and the bullying carried out by the spoiled Gwendoline Mary Lacey certainly rings true.Īlthough her parenting may have been attacked by Imogen, Enid’s elder daughter Gillian fondly recalled the author basing her Amelia Jane novels on a large handmade doll she had given her for her third birthday. Taking place at the epnoymous castle atop the Cornish cliffs, the story follows Darrell Rivers, whose determination to be a model pupil and grow into “a good, sound woman the world can lean on” is undermined by her combustible temper and controversies with fellow classmates.
Author blyton series#
To mark the half-century since the writer’s death, here is our selection of some of her finest books.īlyton had already commenced one girls’ boarding school series in 1941 with The Twins at St Clare’s but the beginning of her Malory Towers sequence did a particularly neat job of capturing the excitement and trepidation of starting again away from home long before a certain boy wizard set out for Hogwarts.
And for reasons that may remain entirely mysterious to reading adults, she certainly has that.”
In my view that’s why adults find it difficult to relate to her because she doesn’t quite have the depth it has that childlike quality.”įormer Children’s Laureate Anne Fine has also defended her, telling BBC Radio 4 in 2008: “In times of falling reading levels and limitless other distractions, we grasp at any author who has that turn-the-page quality. Imogen’s daughter Sophie, Enid’s granddaughter, offered a kinder assessment of Blyton’s work in 2009, telling The Guardian: “Her writing is that of an intelligent 12-year-old. As a child, I viewed her as a rather strict authority. Her memory has also been coloured somewhat by A Childhood at Green Hedges, the scathing memoir her daughter Imogen Smallwood wrote in 1989 in which she states: “The truth is, Enid Blyton was arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct. Her tales of youthful pluck and outdoor picnics with lashings of ginger beer might have seemed comically outmoded by the Swinging Sixties but are now read in a spirit of enormous nostalgia for mid-century Britain, the values of friendship, fairness and freedom she espoused appealing to audiences anew in more self-centred times. The BBC refused to dramatise her output during her lifetime on the grounds she was a “second-rater”, while she has been derided for the patriarchal assumptions, snobbery and xenophobia evident in her novels and mocked as a conservative relic of a Britain that no longer exists.Īnd yet she endures. She has sold more than 600 million books, which have never gone out of print, been translated into 90 languages and enjoyed a loyal following among young readers for generations, her characters from the Famous Five to Noddy capturing the imagination and inspiring a taste for adventure.īut Blyton has also been heavily criticised. Children’s writer Enid Blyton sitting in her garden in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, in 1949Įn id Blyton, the popular children’s writer, died 50 years ago this week.Īstonishingly prolific, the author composed some 700 books between 1922, when she published her poetry collection Child Whispers, and her death in Hampstead on 28 November 1968, often rattling out 6,000 words a day at the typewriter.
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