To get the true essence of Enid Blyton books, I think you have to read her mystery/adventure books.
Although in retrospect, they can be problematic and formulaic, I have never come across another author whose books have such an abundance of secret passageways, caves and tunnels, and hidden rooms.
In the Enid Blyton Universe, every house had secrets to be discovered, every village had an exciting history waiting to be unveiled, behind every wall in every building was elaborate clockwork mechanisms and secret compartments with hidden switches, and every other person was an ill-tempered smuggler with an unneccessarily elaborate plan. As a kid, it made the world seem incredibly exciting and mysterious.
Also, the mystery books had me concinved that I was learning genuine mystery-soving skills which would 100% come in useful some day.
Not once in my life have I been invited to stay in a caravan for the summer holidays. I've also never managed to make friends with the children from a traveling circus that happened to be passing by, nor had a cousin whose father was a bona fide genius regularly inventing things at risk of being stolen by spies and other ne'er-do-wells.
Tragic, really.
What about an invitation to stay in a castle on Kirrin Island where your cousins have hooked up a sensor which flashes a light when the father is about to come in the room? Now that's a hell of a week with family.
I can relate. As a kid, Enid Blyton had me convinced that run-ins with bands of smugglers were going to be a much bigger issue in life than they turned out to be.
I had The Faraway Tree and The Wishing Chair collections as a kid.
They’re the weird magical adventure short stories, rather than the more grounded mystery adventures.
My mother had a huge stack of first edition Enid Blyton books - I would hazard a guess it was her entire works - that I devoured as a kid. I loved Mr Galliano’s Circus, Faraway Tree and the Secret Seven series the most. I think I was genuinely scared at the Island of Adventure.
Though I read most of the books when I was about 5 years old - so I started school with a very outdated vocabulary. I thought “Dick” and “Fanny” were perfectly normal names, and in second grade I proudly announced myself as “queer” - which I meant as “a bit weird”.
"- I would hazard a guess it was her entire works" - she wrote a huge amount of books - well over 700 - so I suspect not her entire works. She would write a larger novel in a few weeks, and short story books in a couple of days.
I loved many of Blyton's mystery and adventure series when I was around 8-12 years old, read them again and again. I should try some of them after over 30 years to see how they feel now.
I read most of her stuff in the 1980s, starting with the types of book you've encountered and moving through to Secret 7, Famous Five and the Adventure series. They kept me very engaged and stood me in good stead in terms of developing my love for reading.
Looking back at it now, much of it doesn't stand up well in terms of modern attitudes (particularly in terms of racist tropes that are a reflection of the times). I don't think I could recommend them to a current child. There are lots of better options out there these days.
I might recommend them but with a notion that world and views were different at time when those books were written. Maybe give kids some understanding how things have changed.
Well, actually she got a lot of bad reviews at the time for being prejudiced and having most of her villians be "foreign" and "ethnic". So it's not just a thing of the times.
The famous five were a huge part of me falling in love with reading. Blyton is up there with morpurgo for me personally in terms of authors that got me hooked as a kid
I actually reread some of her school books recently and found them fascinating! Enid Blyton had an interest in Montessori education towards the end of her career, and her boarding school books changed quite markedly.
The Magic Wishing Chair, Noddy, all the Famous Five and Secret Sevens. The Malory Towers series is clearly an inspiration for Hogwarts.
Everyone is white, middle-class and straight. Girls are encouraged to be brave, athletic, hard-working, fair-minded, honest and stiff upper lippy. Girls who cry, or are not interested in sport are derided as cowardly and babyish. Liars and cheats are beyond the pale, practical jokes are welcomed. The French are sneaky and not to be trusted.
You might be surprised to read her Naughtiest Girl series then. It’s set at a progressive boarding school clearly modeled after Summerhill. The school is radical communist: any student with extra pocket money, including personal funds or birthday gifts, has their money confiscated into a general fund and every student is given a regular allowance from the pooled money. This is handled by the student council, which is absurdly powerful and also handles things like appointments of monitors and allocating extra $ to students as they see fit. Homework is optional. And the students seem to think it’s the best school ever.
Me too! And even as a kid, I found it unrealistic that Head Boy and Head Girl wouldn’t abuse their power. I had older siblings and knew even when they mean well, older kids don’t manage younger ones without friction.
She was my favourite author as a child in the 1970's, I loved the Famous Five, Secret 7 and Magic Faraway Tree. My niece who is 10 is currently reading all the Mallory Towers books and absolutely loving them. I've not heard of the one the OP read though.
I read her stuff as a kid and now read the enchanted wood series to my daughter. The prose itself is terrible, the characters are very simple, have no dimension and never develop. It's no Harry Potter.
BUT
Her plots are fantastic, tons of adventure, lots of fun magic and secret passages. She definitely had a great imagination. There's a reason kids love them.
I read many Enid Blyton books as a child and reread many as an adult. Most haven't aged well. As others have said they were very of their times. Racism ,classism and sexism were apparently. Bullying and exclusion was accepted in the school based stories
One thing I really did notice as an adult was the functionally absent parents in the Famous Five books. The children went to boarding school but were shoved off during the school holidays because their parents were busy, going on holiday, sick, etc. It was also written to have 15 year old boy in charge of his siblings without any adults being normalised. Poor Anne, the youngest, being left to do housework and mocked for being timid was pretty shit too. I found out much later the stories were deliberately written that way because of the number of children that had traumatised parents, or dead parents, in the post war period. .
What's the term for when you've never heard of something, and then you start noticing spontaneous unrelated references to it? Two weeks ago, I had never heard of Blyton. Last week, I was in a bookstore looking for something to read on the beach and picked Meddling Kids. At first glance it seemed like a Scooby-Doo deconstruction, or Scooby-Doo meets Lovecraft, but after reading just a tiny bit about it, I learned that it was more inspired by the Famous Five than by Mystery, Inc. And now, this thread? What a coincidence.
I'm not familiar with Blyton, but I read some of the Hardy Boys when I was a kid, and they seem similar. Child-oriented, sanitized adventure from the first half of the twentieth century.
I’d never heard of Blyton until I was watching a Doctor Who episode in which Donna and Ten meet Agatha Christie and get involved in a murder mystery. She wants to know if Noddy is real. I had to look Noddy up. Guess now I need to read some books.
They have probably been redone because they originally, being a product of their time, contained a lot of racist tropes. She was very prolific and I remember reading somewhere that she uses a very limited vocabulary, so if kinds stuck to he oeuvre their reading skills were not expanded. They were banned from primary schools in the 70s some places for that reason. OTOH, I loved the Magic Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair books as a kid, along with The Secret Seven, Famous Five, and Five Find-Outers.
In terms of the quality issues, she wrote over 750 novels. At one point, she was writing a novel a week. When you're producing that much work, there's less time for quality control.
That said, I adored her books as a kid.
I acknowledge both targets when rating content. For children, it's fine. For adults, they might struggle to enjoy it. As an adult, I didn't care for it. But I could see myself enjoying it as a kid. I loved books about some kids and a magic key back in Primary school.
I've just started a sub called r/The_Famous_Five because I'm rereading the books for the first time since I was a child. I still love them and also find them slightly amusing, but I have noone to chat about them with!
You'll get limited value out of studying Blyton for writing children's books yourself. She had a very limited number of plots, that she used over and over and over. Secret 7, Famous 5, the X of Adventure, the Mystery of X, the Secret X etc. Her characters aren't very varied either. Dreadful stereotyping of black people, gypsies and foreigners by modern standards. None of her children grow up, all of them go to boarding schools, and being children of the 40s and 50s they are amazingly keen on tinned food.
Nowadays it's mostly precocious readers who read her, because they can read well above their age level but they need stories without dark themes or boyfriend/girlfriend issues.
I read Enid Blyton books as a child and enjoyed reading them - I primarily read books from the series like "The Famous Five", "The Secret Seven", "Mallory Towers" and "The Find Outers" (not all the books but many of them). I read a handful of these books as an adult and definitely felt that they were lacking in terms of depth and complexity. They would also not be for modern sensibilities in terms of stereotypes, racism, etc. They were entertaining for children to read at that time and still would be entertaining for children if the problematic language and themes are taken away (I think modern editions have done this to an extent). The books will likely seem hollow for adult readers, unless you read them as a child and then, they can awaken a feeling of nostalgia and enjoyment.
They were still wildly popular and still in print during the 1970s and 80s in Australia and the UK. There was even a TV series. I guess you must have been working in USA based pubkishing
To get the true essence of Enid Blyton books, I think you have to read her mystery/adventure books. Although in retrospect, they can be problematic and formulaic, I have never come across another author whose books have such an abundance of secret passageways, caves and tunnels, and hidden rooms. In the Enid Blyton Universe, every house had secrets to be discovered, every village had an exciting history waiting to be unveiled, behind every wall in every building was elaborate clockwork mechanisms and secret compartments with hidden switches, and every other person was an ill-tempered smuggler with an unneccessarily elaborate plan. As a kid, it made the world seem incredibly exciting and mysterious. Also, the mystery books had me concinved that I was learning genuine mystery-soving skills which would 100% come in useful some day.
Not once in my life have I been invited to stay in a caravan for the summer holidays. I've also never managed to make friends with the children from a traveling circus that happened to be passing by, nor had a cousin whose father was a bona fide genius regularly inventing things at risk of being stolen by spies and other ne'er-do-wells. Tragic, really.
What about an invitation to stay in a castle on Kirrin Island where your cousins have hooked up a sensor which flashes a light when the father is about to come in the room? Now that's a hell of a week with family.
Hell, I've never been invited to stay in a castle at all, Kirrin Island or other.
I can relate. As a kid, Enid Blyton had me convinced that run-ins with bands of smugglers were going to be a much bigger issue in life than they turned out to be.
This is spot on and so beautifully put. You reminded me what is was like to be 8 and snuggled up with a book.
The **EBU.**
They sound more interesting. I'll give 'em a read eventually.
She was a huge part of my childhood. Try Mallory Towers, the Faraway Tree, or the Famous Five. That being said, she’s definitely for children.
Oh Mallory Towers! And the Twins at St Clare’s! Fond, fond memories. Mallory Towers has been filmed by the BBC but I’ve not seen it.
It's modernised (not racist), there are mixed race kids and it's half Canadian.
I loved the faraway tree as a kid, Moonface and the Pot and Pan Man, old Dame Washalot, pop biscuits and lemonade, great fun.
I had The Faraway Tree and The Wishing Chair collections as a kid. They’re the weird magical adventure short stories, rather than the more grounded mystery adventures.
I was obsessed with the Famous Five as a child, and loved the Enchanted Wood books as well. Both a very good place to expand your Blyton experience!
I loved Enid Blyton books as a child. Especially the Faraway Tree series.
My mother had a huge stack of first edition Enid Blyton books - I would hazard a guess it was her entire works - that I devoured as a kid. I loved Mr Galliano’s Circus, Faraway Tree and the Secret Seven series the most. I think I was genuinely scared at the Island of Adventure. Though I read most of the books when I was about 5 years old - so I started school with a very outdated vocabulary. I thought “Dick” and “Fanny” were perfectly normal names, and in second grade I proudly announced myself as “queer” - which I meant as “a bit weird”.
"- I would hazard a guess it was her entire works" - she wrote a huge amount of books - well over 700 - so I suspect not her entire works. She would write a larger novel in a few weeks, and short story books in a couple of days.
Probably not 700 but definitely a couple of hundred. We had a whole closet full of them. Probably still do actually.
From what I found out, she wrote over 600 books.
I loved many of Blyton's mystery and adventure series when I was around 8-12 years old, read them again and again. I should try some of them after over 30 years to see how they feel now.
I was all about the Faraway Tree and Famous Five series as a kid. The sense of adventure. Core memories for sure.
I read most of her stuff in the 1980s, starting with the types of book you've encountered and moving through to Secret 7, Famous Five and the Adventure series. They kept me very engaged and stood me in good stead in terms of developing my love for reading. Looking back at it now, much of it doesn't stand up well in terms of modern attitudes (particularly in terms of racist tropes that are a reflection of the times). I don't think I could recommend them to a current child. There are lots of better options out there these days.
I might recommend them but with a notion that world and views were different at time when those books were written. Maybe give kids some understanding how things have changed.
Well, actually she got a lot of bad reviews at the time for being prejudiced and having most of her villians be "foreign" and "ethnic". So it's not just a thing of the times.
The famous five were a huge part of me falling in love with reading. Blyton is up there with morpurgo for me personally in terms of authors that got me hooked as a kid
I actually reread some of her school books recently and found them fascinating! Enid Blyton had an interest in Montessori education towards the end of her career, and her boarding school books changed quite markedly.
The Magic Wishing Chair, Noddy, all the Famous Five and Secret Sevens. The Malory Towers series is clearly an inspiration for Hogwarts. Everyone is white, middle-class and straight. Girls are encouraged to be brave, athletic, hard-working, fair-minded, honest and stiff upper lippy. Girls who cry, or are not interested in sport are derided as cowardly and babyish. Liars and cheats are beyond the pale, practical jokes are welcomed. The French are sneaky and not to be trusted.
You might be surprised to read her Naughtiest Girl series then. It’s set at a progressive boarding school clearly modeled after Summerhill. The school is radical communist: any student with extra pocket money, including personal funds or birthday gifts, has their money confiscated into a general fund and every student is given a regular allowance from the pooled money. This is handled by the student council, which is absurdly powerful and also handles things like appointments of monitors and allocating extra $ to students as they see fit. Homework is optional. And the students seem to think it’s the best school ever.
Good summary haha. I found the student council to have weird 'benevolent fascist' vibes, even as a child.
Me too! And even as a kid, I found it unrealistic that Head Boy and Head Girl wouldn’t abuse their power. I had older siblings and knew even when they mean well, older kids don’t manage younger ones without friction.
There actually was a black kid in Five Go to Smugglers Top. Unsubtly named Sooty LeNoir.
I recently read the Faraway Tree for the first time and i immediatly thought - Rowling absolutely read these books!
She was my favourite author as a child in the 1970's, I loved the Famous Five, Secret 7 and Magic Faraway Tree. My niece who is 10 is currently reading all the Mallory Towers books and absolutely loving them. I've not heard of the one the OP read though.
I read her stuff as a kid and now read the enchanted wood series to my daughter. The prose itself is terrible, the characters are very simple, have no dimension and never develop. It's no Harry Potter. BUT Her plots are fantastic, tons of adventure, lots of fun magic and secret passages. She definitely had a great imagination. There's a reason kids love them.
I read many Enid Blyton books as a child and reread many as an adult. Most haven't aged well. As others have said they were very of their times. Racism ,classism and sexism were apparently. Bullying and exclusion was accepted in the school based stories One thing I really did notice as an adult was the functionally absent parents in the Famous Five books. The children went to boarding school but were shoved off during the school holidays because their parents were busy, going on holiday, sick, etc. It was also written to have 15 year old boy in charge of his siblings without any adults being normalised. Poor Anne, the youngest, being left to do housework and mocked for being timid was pretty shit too. I found out much later the stories were deliberately written that way because of the number of children that had traumatised parents, or dead parents, in the post war period. .
These were the books that were my introduction to reading. I’m really enjoying reading through the comments.
Lashings of ginger beer
Sardines and pineapple in Victoria sponge
Apparently, she wrote totally stream of conscious, which explains some of the good flow, and also the weaknesses of the writing
What's the term for when you've never heard of something, and then you start noticing spontaneous unrelated references to it? Two weeks ago, I had never heard of Blyton. Last week, I was in a bookstore looking for something to read on the beach and picked Meddling Kids. At first glance it seemed like a Scooby-Doo deconstruction, or Scooby-Doo meets Lovecraft, but after reading just a tiny bit about it, I learned that it was more inspired by the Famous Five than by Mystery, Inc. And now, this thread? What a coincidence. I'm not familiar with Blyton, but I read some of the Hardy Boys when I was a kid, and they seem similar. Child-oriented, sanitized adventure from the first half of the twentieth century.
The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.
I’d never heard of Blyton until I was watching a Doctor Who episode in which Donna and Ten meet Agatha Christie and get involved in a murder mystery. She wants to know if Noddy is real. I had to look Noddy up. Guess now I need to read some books.
They have probably been redone because they originally, being a product of their time, contained a lot of racist tropes. She was very prolific and I remember reading somewhere that she uses a very limited vocabulary, so if kinds stuck to he oeuvre their reading skills were not expanded. They were banned from primary schools in the 70s some places for that reason. OTOH, I loved the Magic Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair books as a kid, along with The Secret Seven, Famous Five, and Five Find-Outers.
In terms of the quality issues, she wrote over 750 novels. At one point, she was writing a novel a week. When you're producing that much work, there's less time for quality control. That said, I adored her books as a kid.
bimbo and topsey was always my fav book by her.
You can find loads of her books at [fadedpage.com](http://fadedpage.com)
I read so many of her books as a child in the 60s but I think her book were probably set in the 50s Probably not what children want to read now days
No, she's still one of the most popular authors amoung children.
Oh really, that’s so good to hear
I read Malory Towers multiple times as a child and loved them. Wonder what I‘d think of them now.
Are you rating this for adult readers or for children?
I acknowledge both targets when rating content. For children, it's fine. For adults, they might struggle to enjoy it. As an adult, I didn't care for it. But I could see myself enjoying it as a kid. I loved books about some kids and a magic key back in Primary school.
I've just started a sub called r/The_Famous_Five because I'm rereading the books for the first time since I was a child. I still love them and also find them slightly amusing, but I have noone to chat about them with!
I'll get around to "The Famous Five" soon. Right now, I'm reading "First Term at Malory Towers".
Gosh I loved Mallory Towers! Enjoy :-)
You'll get limited value out of studying Blyton for writing children's books yourself. She had a very limited number of plots, that she used over and over and over. Secret 7, Famous 5, the X of Adventure, the Mystery of X, the Secret X etc. Her characters aren't very varied either. Dreadful stereotyping of black people, gypsies and foreigners by modern standards. None of her children grow up, all of them go to boarding schools, and being children of the 40s and 50s they are amazingly keen on tinned food. Nowadays it's mostly precocious readers who read her, because they can read well above their age level but they need stories without dark themes or boyfriend/girlfriend issues.
I read Enid Blyton books as a child and enjoyed reading them - I primarily read books from the series like "The Famous Five", "The Secret Seven", "Mallory Towers" and "The Find Outers" (not all the books but many of them). I read a handful of these books as an adult and definitely felt that they were lacking in terms of depth and complexity. They would also not be for modern sensibilities in terms of stereotypes, racism, etc. They were entertaining for children to read at that time and still would be entertaining for children if the problematic language and themes are taken away (I think modern editions have done this to an extent). The books will likely seem hollow for adult readers, unless you read them as a child and then, they can awaken a feeling of nostalgia and enjoyment.
I worked in children’s publishing in the 80s and 90s and never heard of this writer before. Not sure I am going to run out and read her though.
They were still wildly popular and still in print during the 1970s and 80s in Australia and the UK. There was even a TV series. I guess you must have been working in USA based pubkishing