Enid Blyton has been disparaged by her critics since the 1950s and her stock is still low, though this has not deterred readers. New editions of her work have been published regularly since her death in 1968. Recently, there have also been stage and television adaptations of her Malory Towers books, while other authors have continued to write stories based on her characters.
There are also Famous Five parodies, which rely on readers’ familiarity with the series. A continuing affection for her work is apparent, though it is not always clear whether this comes from parents or their children. Reading Enid Blyton places the author’s work in its cultural and historical context.
The book examines a sample of her vast output, looking at five recurring themes: a sense of place, a sense of period, a sense of childhood, a sense of class and a sense of fantasy. A survey of changing attitudes towards Blyton reveals contrasting ways of looking at her work and raises the question whether she was as reactionary a writer as she appeared.
This book has been mentioned on the forums and I think in Journal 74. It's price put many off. It is available on kindle for the comparatively lower price of £9.99 at present.
Anybody got it, read it yet?
Here is the amazon sample in pdf form so you can decide if you would like to buy the book:
I enjoyed the extract and agree with much of what the author says, but at the same time I did not think it contained anything very new that would tempt me to purchase the book.
Thanks Pete.
I did enjoy the excerpt from 'Reading Enid Blyton, though I was surprised at a number of errors which should have been picked up before publication. Apart from debatable statements there are outright mistakes. On the first page of the Preface Enid Blyton is credited with 'The Treasure Seekers' , presumably 'The Treasure Hunters'. Then, 'The Secret Seven' series did not begin in wartime (began in 1949). The children's ages are hardly left vague in the Adventure series when, in the first book, 'The Island of Adventure' Lucy the youngest is described as looking about eleven and Philip (presumably his classmate Jack as well) is not yet fourteen. There is sometimes a lack of clarity. For example it is stated that Blyton 'elides travellers, circus performers and fairground workers'. Does this mean that they don't speak the received BBC pronunciation of the day?
However, I found the contextualization, the likening of Blyton's appeal to children with the appeal of popular writers for adults very interesting. I shall try to get the local library to get the ebook - I've never tried that before not being keen on reading from screens, but I'm 100% certain they would die of shock if I tried to get the book version.
A really fascinating article - it covers a lot of ground, and much of it is familiar to me as I have covered much of the same ground in my own work on Enid, the historical context and rural/ family idealism of her imagined (1930s - 1950s ) world in particular. I also did quite a bit of research on the context of her school books, eg writers like the mid-late Victorian Talbot Baines Reed (inventor of the idea of a 'form' and its members as central to a school novel, cf St Clares and Malory Towers) and covering Angela Brazil and Elinor Brent Dyer in detail. I have details of what you can find where about the modern studies of in the various authors mentioned, in books and articles, if any members are interested - I think my reading list must have been the same as this author's!
The pioneering British 1930s - 40s organic farmer and ecologist Rolf Gardiner (1902-69) who is mentioned in pp. 23-4 of this article was father of the modern orchestra conductor and musicologist John Eliot Gardiner, and was in fact half-Austro-Hungarian and Jewish and was brought up in Berlin where his father was a famous archaeology professor. He is a fascination of mine on the count of his rural enthusiasms; he was later a founder of the Soil Association and also pioneered ecologically preservationist forestry. (His German connections in the 1930s have made him a bit controversial.) The farms where he carried out much of his work (Springhead and Gore Farm, nr Shaftesbury) were geographically quite close to Enid's Manor Farm, Stourton Caundle , aka 'Finniston Farm', in N Dorset and Springhead is still an ecological and musical centre with its own Trust (and website). There are quite a lot of mentions of him in recent books on rural revivalism which I have read, and he is a central figure in Patrick Wright's 'The Village That Died For England', a study of the Army's takeover of the coastal village of Tyneham near Corfe Castle in 1941 for a Second WW tank-firing training range (still extant and audible today!) and failure to return it after the War, which led to a campaign of protest against this broken promise in which RG got involved in the 1960s. The edges of the 'forbidden zone' include Lulworth to the West, which Enid seems to have used for inspiration for 'The Rub-A-Dub Mystery' and has a real blowhole like the one in the book, and Creech Heath with its sandy common and ponds near Corfe to the East - which I reckon gave Enid ideas for the forbidden RAF zone where the Famous Five were told off for bathing in a pond near a secret airfield in Billycock Hill. I remember seeing the barbed wire and notices of the zone when I first visited Lulworth in 1967, when the protests were underway, and wondering why it was so secret; you can now walk across the zone to Tyneham in summer on a Famous Five-style hike and I have done this often.
Percy Westerman, who the author mentions, is another 'local' to Enid's holiday area - he lived for years on a barge near the bridge at Wareham, down the road from Corfe, and there is now a plaque to him there. The mention of Five Have A Wonderful Time is also spot-on - and in fact you can go further and note that as it was pub in 1952 Enid was probably writing it at the time of the real-life Burgess and Maclean defection to the USSR scandal in 1951. Given that Jeffrey Pottersham is correctly suspected (including by Uncle Quentin) of planning to defect and there was at the time uncertainty over the motives of his more respectable missing colleague , Donald Maclean (son of a 1930s Liberal Education Secretary), did this give ideas to Enid for the contrast between Pottersham and (in fact innocent and kidnapped) Terry-Kane?
Enid may have been socially conventional in her detective stories, but she has plenty of incompetent policemen so she was not that deferential - cf not only PC Goon but the police in Five Have Plenty of Fun and the bumbling local PC in Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm and SC Again who always thinks Twigg the poacher is guilty of any local crime and has the latter run rings around him. It's Lotta not the police who gets Lucky back from his rival circus kidnapper in Hurrah For The Circus, and it's Carlotta who gets Sadie back before the police arrive in Summer Term At St Clare's; Enid reserves her approval for the more flexible police 'high-ups' such as Inspector Jenks (and Bill Cunningham, who seems to be connected to either Special Branch as well as MI5 as he deals with domestic, non-spy crooks) .
timv wrote: ↑21 Jun 2022, 17:39
Enid may have been socially conventional in her detective stories, but she has plenty of incompetent policemen so she was not that deferential - cf not only PC Goon but the police in Five Have Plenty of Fun
There was a policeman in Five On A Hike Together, but I've always thought this was Goon. It may explain why there were conflicting reports of where Goon was when Pippin stood in for him, he was actually in Reebles.
Thanks for the sample, Pete. Like Boodi, I doubt there will be much in the book that will be new to me but I'll give it a read if I can get hold of a library copy.
"Heyho for a starry night and a heathery bed!" - Jack, The Secret Island.
"There is no bond like the bond of having read and liked the same books."
- E. Nesbit, The Wonderful Garden.
