Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Enid Blyton
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Standard Name: Blyton, Enid
Birth Name: Enid Mary Blyton
Married Name: Enid Mary Pollock
Pseudonym: Mary Pollock
Married Name: Enid Mary Darrell Waters
Pseudonym: Justin Geste
EB
was probably the most prolific and successful children's writer of the twentieth century. In three decades she produced more than four hundred titles: picture-books for small children, fairy stories, adventure stories, school stories, fantasy, religious and nature works, and two very popular weekly magazines. She hit her highest annual output—37 titles—twice: in 1951 and again in 1955.
Stoney, Barbara. Enid Blyton. Hodder and Stoughton, 1974.
233-5, 238-9
Editions of titles beginning with her name account for about 370 items in the Bodleian Library
catalogue.
Formative early reading included Richard Scarry
and Kenneth Grahame
's The Wind in the Willows. Joanne Rowling did not care for Enid Blyton
as a young child but acquired a taste for her later...
Education
Meiling Jin
She was saved by the public Children's Library. She read omnivorously, beginning with the Dr Doolittle books (Hugh Lofting
) and fairy stories but missing out on Enid Blyton
(who was kept locked away)...
Education
Jan Morris
Morris's mother, who liked to have several books in different languages on the go at the same time, taught eclectic reading to her child. Both Lewis CarrollAlice in Wonderland and Mark TwainHuckleberry Finn made a great impression...
Education
Beryl Bainbridge
BB
described her reading at nine years old as a mixture: George Eliot
and children's writers like Richmal Crompton
and Susan Coolidge (Sarah Woolsey
): Just William, What Katy Did, The Mill...
Education
Fay Weldon
FW
learned to read at three: I remember . . . the way the letters suddenly made sense.
Weldon, Fay. Auto da Fay. Flamingo, 2002.
24
After her grandmother joined the family in 1942 she was able to borrow adult books from...
Friends, Associates
Alison Uttley
Though her move south made her the townswoman of her fellow children's writer, Enid Blyton
, AU
disliked her on principle and met her only once, socially. Blyton was icy at this encounter: she may...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dodie Smith
By this time she had lived with dalmatians for twenty years. Jon Wynne-Tyson
(who had just launched his new publishing house) had recently suggested that she should do a book about them. She replied dismissively...
Following her death, G. K. Chesterton
in a laudatory (if sexist) review classed LMA
with Austen
as an early realist, and praised her apt depictions of human truths.
Chesterton, G. K. “Louisa Alcott”. Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott, edited by Madeleine B. Stern, G. K. Hall, 1984, pp. 212-14.
213-14
She was a favourite writer...
Intertextuality and Influence
Michelene Wandor
The neighbours in question are, at the play's beginning, a pair of lesbians (Sandy or Sandra and George or Georgina, who calls herself at least in part after Enid Blyton
's tomboy heroine) and a...
Reception
Angela Brazil
Though she gave her schools some modern improvements (competitive games, drama, art) which her own had lacked, her ethos remained a pre-first-world-war one to the end of her career. Enid Blyton
, born thirty years...
Reception
Margaret Forster
In a National Women's Register
poll of members to determine the best woman writer of the twentieth century, MF
came third with twenty-one votes, just behind Margaret Atwood
with twenty-five and just ahead of Enid Blyton
Textual Production
Edith Lyttelton
Upton first used a drawing of one of her own childhood dolls, a black minstrel doll, to illustrate Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg, a book written by her mother, Bertha Upton
