Enid Blyton

My generation grew up with Enid Blyton, and I know I am not alone in feeling that her decline in popularity is a shame. It became fashionable 10 or 20 years ago to decry her dated style, sexist characters, incipient racism, simplistic plots, unrealistic denouements and limited vocabulary, and in some ways these criticisms are difficult to deny. And yet she has been one of the most successful authors of the twentieth century, and there are an awful lot of us who still regard her work as that which lit the flame of our reading. She's still in print, which says something about our continued affection for her, but I feel it's time for critics to be less grudging about her - she is due a more positive renaissance!

She adheres pretty much to what is now regarded as an essential formula in children's literature - the convention of making the parents or guardians absent or at least peripheral to the children's
activities, thus leaving them free to explore and tackle challenges on their own, getting into trouble, and getting themselves out of it again. This can be an exciting discovery for a relatively young reader exploring their first "proper" books - and she writes about real children, not anthropomorphised animals like so many other children's books. [I should add a caveat at this point: that I never read The Magic Faraway Tree, or Noddy and Big Ears. I began with the Secret Seven, and quickly moved on to the Adventure Series, the Famous Five, and Malory Towers, so what I'm saying is based entirely on those!]

Blyton has that magic touch, and the ability as Susan Hill puts it for "turning non-readers into readers": in simple terms, she writes exciting adventures and you have to be pretty hard-hearted not to get drawn in. The children in her stories are allowed access to the outside world in a way few modern children experience, and as such are pretty resourceful and used to using their own initiative, without the aid of magic or any gimmicks. As a child I was deeply envious of the way they'd just set off into the countryside with a rucksack full of picnic stuff and a map (in much the same way as I adored the Fell Farm series by Marjorie Lloyd, where the children go off and camp in the Lake District on their own) and I think this remains a big part of the appeal.

Blyton's characters undeniably live in a world that seems dated to us, but we can still identify with them, and long to take part in their adventures, whether that's a midnight feast in the dorm at Malory Towers, or tiptoeing through a secret passage by the wavering light of a torch. Yes, some of her attitudes stink (what comes to mind is the girls always doing the washing up, and George being told she can't muck in because she's not a boy...) but they need to be seen as very much of their time - and could provide useful springboards for discussion with a modern child about how attitudes have changed.

Just writing this blog post is making me want to raid the library for an armful of her books, and stock up on torch batteries so I can stay up late and read under the duvet...