Who Was Enid Blyton?

Raised in and out of India, I don’t remember reading too many Enid Blyton novels—barring those from the Noddy series. I knew, though, they were all the rage among girls—mostly girls. They’d spend hours reading them and like fish in a school, prattle over what they’d read over their lunchboxes.

- Alakananda Mookerjee

So, I came to Barbara Stoney’s biography of this best-selling 20th century storyteller, Enid Blyton, originally published in 1974—not knowing what to expect. But in the back of my mind, I had an impression of her as a matronly figure in the mold of Agatha Christie’s female detective Jane Marple—single, serene, even stout. The book’s vanilla cover only reinforced that notion. I didn’t think that I’d take to it, but I fell into the narrative quite effortlessly and enjoyed the portrait enough to pick up one of her books today.

Diehard fans would remember how long they sat curled up in their beds or by an open window, devouring one slim volume after another. And when they reached the end, they looked forward to the next— and they kept coming serially, too.

Over her lifetime, Blyton penned 750 books, at the astonishing rate of 23 a year. Six hundred million copies of her books have been sold worldwide. Incredulous detractors refused to believe that a single individual could have this phenomenal output, fueling rumors that she’d employed a stable of ghost writers. Sure enough, achieving this feat of creative derring-do called for boundless literary stamina, one that was her own, though developed during some of the saddest days of her childhood. For her, pen and paper was an escape from an unhappy home environment. A silent spectator to stormy exchanges between her parents, she took comfort in the sweet tales she came up with.