Enid Blyton (August 11, 1897 - November 28, 1968) was a British children's author of Noddy, The Famous Five, The Five Find-Outers, The Mystery Series, The Adventure Series, The Secret Seven, Malory Towers, The St. Clare's series, The Naughtiest Girl series, The Magic Faraway Tree series, The Wishing-Chair series, and hundreds of other books for younger and older children.
Her prolific output involved mainly escapist children's fantasy, often but not always involving the supernatural. Her books were immensely popular in Britain and Australia, and were translated into 40 languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese and Hebrew.
It is said at one point she was producing 10,000 words a day. With such an output, this lead many to believe some of her work was ghost written, but such ghost writers have not emerged.
Subject Matter
From a contemporary perspective, the books also have sometimes none-too-subtle reinforcement of Britain's class system, undoubtedly present are stereotypes of sexist behaviour, and some argue that the portrayal of golliwogs, amongst others, were racist. However, Blyton's books also managed to tap into the dreams of pre-pubertal children, offering worlds where children are free to play and explore without adult interference, more clearly than most authors before or since.
It was frequently reported, from the 1980s onwards, that various children's libraries removed some of Blyton's works from the shelves. This has been attributed at times to language permitting double entendre (e.g. a tendency to imagine sexual connotations, for instance, Noddy "jumping into bed" with Big Ears, another character, clearly not intended by the author). Reprints of some books have had changes made (such as the replacement of golliwogs with teddy bears), which has itself drawn criticism from many who view it as tampering with an important piece of the history of children's literature. This area is also subject to urban myths and the retelling in newspapers of those anecdotes as factual, making it somewhat difficult to discern the truth.