Enid Blyton (1897 to 1968) was an English children’s writer whose books have sold more than 600 million copies and been translated into ninety languages. She is best remembered for Noddy, the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, the Five Find-Outers, the Faraway Tree and Malory Towers.
Blyton was born in East Dulwich, south London, on 11 August 1897 and went to St Christopher’s School in Beckenham. She trained as a teacher, taught at Bickley Park School and then worked as a nursery governess in Surbiton. Her first book, “Child Whispers”, a 24-page collection of poems, came out in 1922, and in 1926 she took over the editing of the magazine “Sunny Stories”.
Her early novels included “Adventures of the Wishing-Chair” (1937) and “The Enchanted Wood” (1939). The 1940s brought the school stories “The Naughtiest Girl in the School” (1940), “The Twins at St. Clare’s” (1941) and “First Term at Malory Towers” (1946). “Five on a Treasure Island” (1942) introduced Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog, and twenty more Famous Five books followed up to 1963. “The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage” (1943) launched the Five Find-Outers and “The Island of Adventure” (1944) the eight Adventure novels. Six books first appeared under the pseudonym Mary Pollock and were later reissued under her own name.
In 1949 she began the Secret Seven, which ran to fifteen novels, and published “Noddy Goes to Toyland”, about a little wooden boy from Toyland, with pictures by the Dutch illustrator Harmsen van der Beek. By the early 1950s she was often publishing more than fifty books a year.
From the 1950s her work became controversial among critics, teachers and parents. The BBC declined to broadcast her stories from the 1930s until the 1950s, and her books have been criticised as elitist, sexist and racist, though revised editions have stayed popular. She ended the Famous Five and Secret Seven series in 1963, and died in a Hampstead nursing home on 28 November 1968, aged 71.
The Famous Five were adapted for television in 1978 and again in 1995, and a BBC series of “Malory Towers” began in 2020. Helena Bonham Carter played Blyton in the BBC film “Enid” (2009). Jacqueline Wilson added two new Faraway Tree novels in 2022 and 2023.
