Ah, now that's quite fascinating, to have a direct statement from Enid confirming why she preferred not to write books "bringing in the war"! And yes, that is interesting that she was thinking of future sales and wanting to avoid her books feeling dated, as well as wanting to take children's minds off the war during and after it. I'd guessed the latter reason was in her mind, but I wasn't sure if she was thinking of the former ("the war inevitably dates a book"), and now we know she was.Anita Bensoussane wrote: ↑19 Nov 2023, 11:42 The Island of Adventure was almost a war novel. In Enid Blyton - A Literary Life, Andrew Maunder says that Macmillan initially wanted Enid to write them an adventure novel "based on a plot of their own design. This featured two teenagers, an older girl and a younger boy, returning from the United States to do war work in Britain via the Atlantic (a perilous crossing, given the threat of being torpedoed by German submarines). Once in London, the girl would get a job at the Admiralty, during which time she would meet an American pilot (on leave after being wounded on a bombing raid over Germany). He would take the girl and her brother under his wing." [These details were outlined in a memorandum dated 16th July 1943]. Macmillan felt that such a story would cement the bond between the USA and Britain, and establish Enid Blyton in America.
However, Enid wasn't keen on writing war-based fiction by that stage. On 19th July 1943 she wrote in a letter to Macmillan: "...do you mind if I don't write a book bringing in the war? I say this for two reasons - one is that the war inevitably dates a book, and after the war is over few people will want to read about it - certainly we shall want our children to forget it! Another reason is that there are still a great many people who definitely will not buy a book about the war for their children - they prefer stories that take the children's minds away from it, and this is quite right."
As Db105 and Courtenay have said, Enid Blyton hoped to avoid her stories being seen as period pieces, and wanted them to provide an escape for children.
Of course for many of today's young and not-so-young readers, WW2 and other now-historical periods are very interesting to read about. But if I'd lived through that war as a child, I can imagine I wouldn't much like to be reminded of it in fictional works, since the reality would have been hard enough to live through as it was — not only all the rationing and restrictions and general sense of fear, but especially for those who'd lost family and friends in the fighting or in the bombings. I'm thinking if I were in that position, I probably wouldn't enjoy reading fictional stories about that time.
I don't think the Covid pandemic of 2020-21 seriously compares to WW2 in scope, but it was certainly the longest and most widespread public crisis since the war, and I'm aware it already features in books written during and after it. I don't want to read any of them. Even though I personally wasn't too badly affected — no-one close to me died or became seriously ill, and because I work in the care sector, I didn't lose my job and my work routines didn't change very much — it was still a very difficult time and I would rather not keep on being reminded of it any more than necessary. There are plenty of other people who suffered much worse than I and my family did, and I wouldn't be surprised if they don't want to be reminded of it constantly either. But then, in decades to come, young readers who weren't around then will quite possibly find it an interesting historical topic, just as we in the post-war generations do with WW2!
Shifting the topic a bit to another writer of the same period as Enid Blyton — this is reminding me of another of my favourite classic series for children, the Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. As some here will remember, the first book he wrote in the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,* opens with the four children being "sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids", to stay with the old Professor in his big old house in the country. But that one sentence in the opening paragraph is the only reference to "the war" in the entire book. I'm also a member of an online Narnia forum and we've had several discussions about this topic there too!
Some modern adaptations of the story have made a big feature of the wartime setting — the 2005 film shows the children experiencing a bombing raid shortly before they leave their home, and a stage version of it that I saw some years ago played up the WW2 references even more, including while the children are in Narnia. But Lewis, who started writing this story in the late 1940s (it was first published in 1950), doesn't do that at all. There are no points where his child characters are shown to be thinking or talking about the war and worrying about their parents or other relatives, and there are no comparisons — even implied ones — between the war in our own world and the White Witch's tyrannical rule over Narnia. Lewis just uses "the war" as a plot device to get his child characters away from their parents — always a handy thing when you're writing a fantasy adventure for young readers — and then never brings it up again. I'm guessing that, especially as he too was writing soon after the real-life war for an audience who would remember it, he felt his young readers wouldn't want or need to be reminded of it.
* Which, to tie in with the discussion in the English spelling and grammar thread, has never had an Oxford comma in the title.
