Probably because my mother was English, but I read several of Enid Blyton’s books as a child, but I haven’t found many people here in the US who’ve heard of her. My mother-in-law has, but she’s English as well.
Anyone else read The Enchanted Wood, The Faraway Tree, Once Upon a Birthday? I believe she was a very prolific English children’s author, but I don’t know that she’s made the “leap across the pond” that JK Rowling has.
I grew up reading Enid Blyton. The Famous Five, St. Clares, The Adventure Series, and many others.
I read every Enid Blyton book in my local public library.
Did you know that by the 1950’s, Enid was one of the four most-read authors in the world. She’s written more than 700 books for children.
Even now as an adult, I buy Enid Blyton books whenever I see them at the used book store.
I read the whole adventure series as a child, but I can’t for the life of me remember anything about them, except that they all ended in “…of Adventure,” and I think there was a parrot named Kiki.
Yup. I was brought up in Spain, and got a lot of British books from my local Anglo-American library. The first book I read by myself was a Secret Seven adventure. Or maybe it was a Famous Five.
I vividly remember some of her short stories, and the lessons they conveyed. There was one in particular, about a boy who thought his life was miserable, and who wished that he was another boy that he admired. His wish was granted, and he found that the other boy’s life was much worse than his own.
And another one, where a kid was hired to clean out a garden shed. He did a half-hearted job, and when he went to get paid, the owner took him back out to the shed, where his very generous payment was hidden in the pots he hadn’t cleaned, and in drawers he didn’t neaten, etcetera.
Good messages, neat stories. Enid Blyton helped shape me into the person I’ve become.
Can anybody remember the titles of those two stories? I’d love to re-read them.
Before I respond, let me just say that you guys routinely post on stuff that most of the people I know in real life have never heard of. You all rock!..anyhoo…
YES! My father got me into Enid Blyton at a very young age. I’ve read all the books of English girls sent to the dorms, the one where the orphans are run away to the island, the two groups of cousins that always had rip roaring adventures (I was always a George and her dog fan)…all of them, almost!
Last year when I travelled to Scotland I sat next to a sweet old Scottish lady who was tremendously surprised by the fact that I had read them. What she explained to me was that they’ve apparently been sort of shoved aside in the UK for their sometimes rather politically incorrect statements on foreign cultures and women. Personally, I always used to fume at the way Julian treated George-really-Georgiana and the way she would always have to hang back with her little mousey cousin. And that was at the age of 6! But they are awesome books, though. Does anyone else see Enid Blytonesque themes in some of the “Harry Potter” series what with the boarding school and everything?
Didn’t she write some older kids books? I seem to remember something about four kids that take a caravan during the summer, run into an orphan child with a cruel uncle who worked at a circus with a tame gorilla…something about going into a cave??? There was a dog too…
Note to the younger kids…take your books with you when you move out!!!
Ooohhhh YES!
I grew up reading Enid when I was a kid in Oz!
On a very recent trip home, I was delighted to see her books still in book shops down there. My fave was ‘The Naughtiest Girl in The School’ - prolly cuz she reminded me so much of myself!
Hehe 
I loved Enid Blyton as a child. I remember the really young picture books she had, and then the older ones. The ones about the girls at boarding school, those were so utterly quaint. What was the name of that school? The one with the twin girls staring off in first form, working their way up to sixth form. And everyone telling them to buck up and be sensible. Gotta have the English boarding school speak. Yeah, they were pretty sexist, I remember being pretty disgusted that the girls always had to make house and all that, while the boys were out adventuring. Or in the Secret Seven, dismissing the girls as being rather silly and unnecessary. We’ve come a long way baby and all that.
The famous five and secret seven ones were good, too. Particularly the famous five books. Yes they were predicatable, but when I was young I thought they were pretty hot. I remember one where they get an evil tutor whom everyone distrusts except George. And George’s own island. And dog. Ooh, and surly Uncle Quentin, who looking back now, MUST have had a drinking problem. Oh, and the scones, mmm.
I loved Enid Blyton, too.
My favourite stories were about the Faraway Tree. It was a magical tree in the middle of a forest, in which magical folk lived. And every few days a new land would settle at the top of the tree, and you could go and visit.
The woman certainly had an imagination, didn’t she!
Mallory Towers, I think.
Mallory Towers, that was it, thanks, tavalla.
I had about two metres of book shelf devoted to Enid Blyton when I was a kid. Damned if I can remember the stories though. Lessee, there was the Wishing Chair series; the Faraway Tree; the Famous Five; the “of Adventure” series; the “Circus” series (Come to the Circus, Hurrah for the Circus(!) and Circus Days Again. [Slightly frightened that I remember those titles]); and Bingo & Topsy (stories about animals.)
And, of course, Noddy and Big Ears.
The books are very much a product of their age. Blyton’s treatment of foreigners could, at best, be described as ‘colonial’, at worse overtly racist. And she certainly wasn’t one for gender, or class, equality.
She’s also been tarnished with revelations about her private life. Despite her idealic portrail of children in her fiction, she wouldn’t win any prizes in the motherhood stakes. Her daughters recount a very distant mother. Apart from that, she had an unfortunate interest in eugenics, a divorce after which she forbade her daughters any contact with their father, wasn’t adverse to the odd fling on the side and seems to been a difficult person to live with all round.
However, it’s easy to criticise. Blyton’s opinions and treatment of her children were certainly not unusual for her class and period. Eugenics was a popular theory amongst many of the upper classes in the 1930s.
I discovered and devoured whole in the course of about a month the Secret Seven and Famous Five. Never did me any harm!
Enid Blyton’s books were very popular in Germany in the 70s and 80s. I read a lot of them, but can’t be sure of the titles. Not only were the books translated, the names of places and people were almost all changed to German names.
What I remember is “Famous 5” (called 5 Freunde -> 5 friends) in German. This was one of the exceptions, where place and persons’s names stayed English.
Then there were 2 series about girls’ boarding schools. One was about twins (called Hanni & Nanni in German) and the school was “Lindenhof” (I think). The other series was about a tomboyish girl called Dolly in another school…
Sorry for the rambling, I’m just trying to remember this…
Anyway, my point is: they were very popular at a time, there were books, cassettes and TV adaptions. Blyton’s books were considered standard reading for girls between 10 and 16.
Any Blyton fans should take the opportunity to read the script of the Comic Strip’s ‘5 go mad in Dorset’ a somewhat… satirical… take on a blyton theme… WARNING! not for the easily offended!
Gypsy (to Anne) : “You’re very well-developed for a fourteen year-old, aren’t you?”
George : “Timmy’s a very…licky dog.”
heheheheh
dude, I was so the biggest enid blyton fan. so kicked me off as a voracious reader - her books for young kids are very easy to read, but are novels rather than picture books. so i always felt really special reading my adult-sized books while everyone else at kindergarten was still reading about clifford the big red dog and the hungry, hungry caterpillar (or whatever it is - george dubya’s favourite book), with words in big type and bright pictures. mine had little letters and no pictures - how grown up i felt!
i read so many of her books - you’d be hard pressed to find one i didn’t - malory towers, st clares, noddy, famous five, secret seven, the adventurer series, the mystery series, the naughtiest girl series, the five find-outers (only enid blyton could create a character called frederick algernon trotterville aka fatty), willow tree farm (my local library never had cherry tree farm, which disappointed me very much) and a whole range of others).
i do see the sexism, racism, pretty-much-everything-ism of the books now. but when i was reading them growing up, it passed right over my head. i never connected the golly-wogs with black people (as has been alleged). i was a bit confused as to why the girls couldn’t do things the boys could do - after all george was older than dick, but i understood that these were ‘old’ books, and people thought different things in the old days. i’d definitely encourage any kids i ever have to read them.
ivylass:
i read and loved the faraway tree series - i really wanted to climb to the top; the land of take-what-you-please sounded marvellous, if somewhat economically unstable.
anu-la1979
yeah i did - it read like maloy towers had been turned into a house of magic and rewritten by roald dahl 
she did write a school series called Malory Towers, but the one zoggie described was the St Clares series. the twins referred to were Pat and Isobel, the irish twins with quick tempers.
narrad:
actually, bimbo and topsy.
scary that i know all this, aye?
D’oh. All right. St. Clares, that was it! Thanks, gex gex.
I say, that Five Go Mad in Dorset satire is just smashing. It is so true, too. It says it’s a comic, is there a version accompanied with pictures? That would be too much. Those kids were pretty precocious, weren’t they? Who would let a bunch of kids thirteen and under go off on their own, hm? I also remember they had a friend, whose father was a professor, named Tinker (the friend, not the father). He loved tinkering around with car and initially, pretending to BE a car. And he had his own monkey, and a lighthouse, too. And later on, he acquired a cheetah, called Attila, who was subsequently kidnapped.
Ah, nostalgia trips. I remember all of the sexism that you guys are describing, that always got to me. But I didn’t really remember the racism and class consciousness, though I expect it was there.
Zoggie It was a half hour one-off for TV made by The Comic Strip aound IIRC 1980. There was also a sequel : Five go Mad on Mescalin