Enid Blyton,
born on 11 August 1897, in East Dulwich, London, England was a prolific and
highly popular British author of stories, poems, plays, and educational books
for children.
Blyton, the daughter of a businessman, abandoned her
early studies in music to train as a schoolteacher at the Ipswich High School
(1916–18). Her first publication was a poem that appeared in a children’s magazine
when she was only 14, and in 1917 another of her poems was published in Nash’s Magazine. Blyton worked briefly as a teacher
and governess, but by 1921 her stories and poems were appearing steadily in
various magazines, and her first book of poems, Child Whispers, was
published in 1922. Blyton devoted herself full-time to writing from about 1924.
From then until about 1965, she wrote more than 600 children’s books and wrote
innumerable articles for magazines. Some of her stories first appeared in Enid Blyton’s Sunny Stories (1937–52) and other
magazines she founded and edited over the years.
Most of
Blyton’s fiction consists of mystery or adventure stories, though schools and
circuses form the settings of others. Her Famous Five, Secret
Seven, and Mystery series of books were widely read, and in the 1950s her Little Noddy series, featuring the adventures of Little Noddy, Mr.
Plod the policeman, Big Ears, and other characters of Toyland Village, enjoyed
enormous popularity and made her a household name. Blyton’s books feature
clearly delineated good and bad characters and have exciting plots
that illustrate traditional moral lessons. Her vocabulary and prose style are simple and
highly accessible to beginning readers. Blyton came under some criticism for her stereotyped characters and simplistic viewpoint,
but her remarkable popularity with young readers has remained undiminished, and
new editions of her books continue to appear. By the early 21st century her
books had sold some 400 million copies and been translated into at least 90
languages. In 2009, in honour of the 60th birthday of Blyton’s Noddy character
in Noddy
Goes to Toyland, Blyton’s granddaughter Sophie Smallwood
published a new Noddy book, Noddy and the
Farmyard Muddle, with illustrations by Blyton’s own illustrator,
Robert Tyndall.
