The Big Enid Blyton Book by Enid Blyton Review by Terry Gustafson This book deserves a mention because of the sheer variety it contains. With over 240 pages it's a large-format volume that in Enid Blyton's own words "... is an Anthology, which means a collection of writing ï¿½ verses, stories, anything that is written to be read." I made it my Readers' Millennium Choice when suggestions were called for because I felt that it would be an ideal book to accompany the desert island castaway.

I looked on it in exactly the same way that a twelve year-old girl did who wrote to Enid Blyton and suggested it be called "A dip-into book ï¿½ a book with all the characters we know Miss Blyton, so that we can open the book anywhere and dip into it, and meet the Famous Five again, and Kiki the parrot, and Fatty and all the rest." A teenage boy suggested a Reminder Book ï¿½ "I'd like a book ï¿½ a big one please ï¿½ that will remind me of so many of the books I loved." Most of the above is taken from the first entry which is one of those personal letters that the author often wrote at the beginning of a book and in this one she tells us how she thinks of stories and sees them in her mind's eye - something she had mentioned to us in her autobiography almost a decade earlier. The Big Enid Blyton Book therefore, contains representative samples of Blytonia taken from dozens of her presentations.

It even includes some photographs of spellbound children listening to Enid Blyton at a story session and there's also a picture of the garden at Green Hedges, which was the family home in Penn Road. The second item in this volume is a large reproduction of the very famous and (now very expensive) letter that Van Beek sent to the author with the little Noddy sketches on it. I don't know why one needs to bother spending thousands of pounds to buy the original when the copy in this book seems to be a life-size repro ï¿½ in colour as well. Enid Blyton relates: " ... and at the top he painted Noddy and Big-Ears and the rest, for the very first time ï¿½ exactly as I myself had imagined them to be. I was so pleased that I kept the letter and treasured it, and I thought you might like to see it too." There's a short story but with a difference because it stars the Secret Seven. Yes, the original cast is there in an exciting tale called 'Hurry Secret Seven, Hurry'.

This band of school kid crime solvers became very popular indeed with the younger fans and they had many exciting adventures around their little village which I believe was called Peterswood but that may be just a one-off reference and not strictly accurate. There's Peter the leader and his sister Janet and there's also George, Jack, Colin, Pam and Barbara not forgetting the golden-spaniel Scamper. Susie, Jack's sister, features in some of the original stories and supplies the nuisance value that is so essential for added interest although she's not in this particular item because there's not enough space for her brand of continual interference. Not content with giving the reader just one short story of the SS, Enid Blyton repeats the procedure near the end of the book and comes up with 'The Humbug Adventure' that deals with a telescope, a firebug, a haystack and the police. It looks like the pictures in both Secret Seven stories are by two different artists - the second tale has the George Brook look about the pictures although it's hard to be sure. Mr.

Pink-Whistle is represented and he deals with two naughty boys at one stage and in another story about this gentleman, who's half-brownie, he helps a boy with a terrible stammer. The eccentric Mr. Twiddle's somewhere inside getting into trouble with a dog, and there's a one-pager about Jesus who was a very famous man way back in olden times. It's called 'Jesus and the Children' and there's also another story about this character who, like others with charisma, has influenced a considerable amount of people. There's so much material within the pages. For example, those kids who want to start their own club can read all about setting it up and the advice given is modelled very much on the way the Secret Seven handle things. The children who guide us through it call themselves 'The Sturdy Six' and they make their own badges inscribed with S.S. on it, create a password, and have a very enjoyable time. EB was very nature-inclined so there are a few pages about bird watching with two colour plates depicting various pictures of our feathered friends.

There are also several excerpts from the book entitled Rambles with Uncle Nat where Peter and Mary learn all about the countryside when they take part in a series of walks with their very clued-up relative. There are poems as well and one is an entreaty from the animals to man, woman and child for consideration and kindness in their attitudes. Have you made a bird-cake yet? If you have, you're certainly being considerate and kind to your fathered friends and I remember reading one of the Blyton books that described how to go about it and it made me quite hungry. I checked and it's exactly the same one that Aunt Jane helped Tony and Mollie to make in Birds of Our Gardens. Another interesting entry is Mawkins the Hare which is all about the clever tricks those animals get up to and it comes from Enid Blyton's Animal Lover's Book where Richard and Susan learn so much about the natural world from a gypsy named Zachary. The Whistler, which deals with otters, comes from Hedgerow Tales and is yet another interesting insight into the life forms that exist in the world around us.

A nature quiz is featured and there's a piece taken from Enid Blyton's Nature Lover's Book all about the birds and flowers in April about which John, Pat and Janet learn when rambling with their Uncle Merry. He isn't their real Uncle ï¿½ just a friend of the family, who likes to spend his time educating the kids in all aspects of natural lore. He even shows them how to make an aquarium in a big pickle jar and you can learn how to do it as well and then afterwards you can sit down and read one of the poems such as 'On Dorset Hills' ï¿½ A dozen larks sweep upward from my feet As I come by And in the hazy sky They soar on wings that with their quivering beat Keep tremulous time to sibilant sweet song That downward spills Like rainfall on the hills ... So ... we've had The Secret Seven and Mr. Pink-Whistle and Jesus, and some of the wonderful nature books but what else is there? Piles! I'm betting that 99% of Enid Blytonites have heard of the Smugs series and think they're worthy of being filmed again and again.

I've always looked on the eight books as being the major works of Enid Blyton although there are other series more numerous and with plots and characters just as good but the Bill Smugs collection always seemed to stand out just that little bit more. This is possibly because they border on adult reading or maybe it's just a personal thing. Philip, Dinah, Jack and, Lucy Anne, are the courageous and resourceful children who battle forgers and spies, and track gunrunners amongst far-flung islands somewhere around the Outer Hebrides. They take on the ruthless guardians of a mountain King who's quite mad and not content with that they become involved with a Prince in some Ruritanian country, cruise the Mediterranean, and finally round off their adventures with a frightening river voyage somewhere in the near East. Now that's what adventure books are all about! The children manage to survive (only "just" in some cases) by their resourcefulness and with the help of a Secret Serviceman or Top-Cop named Bill Cunningham or Bill Smugs, which is the name he used when he was on undercover duties in the first book.

An excerpt from one of these volumes is included and it will whet your appetite to plough through the rest of them. There are about ten pages from The Mountain of Adventure in this anthology that tell of a thrill-packed episode when the intrepid adventurers are camping out in the Welsh mountains and are visited by what seems to be a wolf pack. There's a picture of Philip with one a great big canine standing up against him with its forepaws on the boy's shoulders! I can't take any more of this terror on a Sunday night so I'll move on. Almost immediately we come across a short story that involves some children who call themselves the Find-Outers. That means detectives in kid-talk and their mystery solving was recorded in a series of fifteen books, which is good because they were (and still are) extremely popular stories. These children are probably subject to more discussion than any others in the Enid Blyton book collection excepting perhaps for the Kirrins who are featured further down. The stories record how the Find-Outers plus a dog search out unexplained happenings in their hometown and try to solve them.

It's not all smooth-sailing because the village policeman wants to be a Find-Outer as well and he's entitled to be so even more than the kids. They clash constantly and become estranged so one might think that the policeman, Mr. Theophilus Goon, is not a very nice person. However, if you begin reading the original books you might suspect that one of the kids who possesses rather a high opinion of himself plays more than his part in baiting the unfortunate lawman. The other Find-Outers also supply their share of disrespect but the leader is a Master at it - known as Fatty, he is one of Enid Blyton's most endearing characters. The Find-Outers are referred to by their nicknames - Bets, Daisy, Pip, Larry, and Fatty. Enid Blyton had a slight penchant for bestowing rather toffee-nosed names on characters who thought highly of themselves so the policeman is Theophilus and Fatty's, real name is Frederick Algernon Trotteville. It was Pip who supplied the nickname in the very early stages when he and the others first met Frederick and didn't take to him all that much.

F.A.T became Fatty and it wasn't all that unexpected to poor Frederick. The dog that accompanies the troupe is a friendly little Scottie belonging to Fatty and is adored by one and all. The short tale with the Find-Outers that appears in this book is called 'Just a Spot of Bother' and it's a treat because it's complete. The illustrations are not by any of the three artists that drew the pictures in the original books and although I've always preferred the Treyer Evans pictures by a long shot, that's neither here nor there. This band of investigators feature in two more stories and that's as it should be because of their status. We have an excerpt from The Mystery of the Strange Bundle and the selector or selectors have picked a classic example because it reports on an extremely humorous occasion when Frederick, the leader of the Find-Outers and his arch-enemy Mr. Goon, both examine an empty house. Read this and you'll want immediate access to the whole book, which you should be able to pick up quite easily. The other sample is from The Mystery of the Vanished Prince, which is about a kidnapped Royal with the Blytonian name of Bongawah.

I think the author had a small stock of well-remembered words that slipped out quite easily when she was creating names and "Bong" was one. The incident recorded involves a trip by the Find-Outers to a place called Raylingham Marshes and it illustrates quite plainly why Fatty is so revered not only amongst his schoolmates but also by the other Find-Outers. Mr. Goon, who's been mentioned already, has a nephew called Ern and he accompanies the Find-Outers on their quest to track down the Prince. Another of the Landmark books is represented and by that I mean the ones that stand out from the bunch. This time it's an excerpt from The Rubadub Mystery. Diana, and Roger and Snubby appeared in this series of six books with their great friend Barnabas, or Barney, and Miranda his pet monkey. They are typical Blyton kids who weather the strange things that happen to them and win out in the end after confronting mystery and adventure. One of the marvellous school stories that Blyton wrote is touched upon because I'm sure there'd be complaints if they had no representation at all.

'Zerelda's Unfortunate Rehearsal' is an episode from one of the Malory Towers books and it illustrates an episode when a very glamorous schoolgirl called Zerelda has an amusing encounter with the school's Matron. Zerelda is trying to show her classmates what a wonderful actress she is and, coming from the land of entertainment - namely America, she thinks she'll wow them all. Unfortunately for her it takes more than what she has to offer to be a successful entertainer and this snippet shows how the girl is "taken down a peg or two." Further on in the book there's another piece from the same series and it's called Mam'zelle's Treek although some readers may not understand what that means initially. Others will know exactly what it signifies because it's from In the Fifth at Malory Towers where the French teacher plays a trick on her students in return for the many they've played on her. It's a very humorous incident and the girls certainly enjoy the occasion because it involves the teacher wearing some Dracula-like false teeth and displaying them not only to her students, but also (inadvertently) to some adults!

There's a picture of her wearing the teeth although it isn't by the original artist but it conveys the message adequately. Yes - The Famous Five are definitely included. Well, they had to be didn't they because they are arguably the most widely known of the characters that Enid Blyton invented. 'Five and a Half-Term Adventure' is the title of the story and it's a cozy little tale that reveals to the uninitiated (if any exist) how these children work together and solve a small problem involving a dog. They aren't specialist mystery solvers ah-la the Find-Outers but they win through with sheer courage and persistence. In case you have been living at the top of an unexplored mountain for the last sixty or so years, the names of the Famous Five are George, Anne, Julian, Dick and Timmy ï¿½ the last named being George's dog. George is not a boy - she just likes them so much that she wants to be one and the best way she can do it (she thinks) is by dressing in boys' clothes and acting tough.

It may be curious when she marries because there will be two men at the altar it would seem, but maybe she will marry someone who wants to be a woman! She's an all right kid though and very popular with everyone as all the Five are. The pictures that go with the short story are in colour and so is the rest of the book's artwork be it sometimes in single or two-tone. I had to puzzle over the artist of the Famous Five story but I'm pretty sure they are by the renowned Eileen Soper although the eighth picture looks as if it's by someone else. Perhaps they needed an extra illustration which didn't exist but on closer look, the dog in that picture does look a little like a Soper dog so I'm guessing a little here. The Famous Five, whose surnames are Kirrin, make a second appearance, which is only right because of their popularity and this time it's an excerpt from Five Have a Wonderful Time where they meet a fire-eater and a python. That doesn't often happen in real life but in this case the original book deals with a circus that the Five encounter.

Further on, there's yet another item about these icons and it's from Five Go Off in a Caravan where, once again, they become involved with a circus and meet a new friend called Nobby. Brer Rabbit shows his face of course because EB wrote several books about this universally appreciated character and interpreted the tales according to her unique talent. The Land of Far Beyond is another Enid Blyton presentation that interprets The Pilgrim's Progress for her readers. I couldn't understand that book much and found it somewhat contrived but it seems to be a fairly popular story. The pictures in the excerpt are by Horace Knowles who did the originals and they're pretty good in that they are a shade different from the run-of-the-mill illustrations that grace the books in general. There's so much stuffed into the compendium that you'll sometimes see an extra item on the page you are reading and in this case it's a RiddleMeRee which the author liked to include as small diversions ï¿½ 'My first is in lamb but not in sheep', and so on.

There's something from The Six Bad Boys ï¿½ a book that came out in about 1951 and it was a kind of social commentary or insight into juvenile delinquency. A few young lads form their own gang and derive a certain kinship and recognition from simply belonging to the little group. Unfortunately, they get into trouble and the Law steps in. The Children at Green Meadows is also represented just at the spot where Francis helps to rescue a pony called Flash. The Christmas Book was one of my favourites when I was little and there are a couple of lovely Treyer Evans pictures supporting a short piece about Christmas tree origins. Susan, Ann, Benny and Peter listen to a story from their mother and then help to decorate the tree beautifully. Full-page colour picture included. One of EB's most popular books is also one of her oldest in the Landmark series. It's called The Secret Island and it's about Mike, Peggy and Nora who chum up with another boy called Jack and run away from their unsettled homes to fend for themselves on a little island in a lake. The extract tells us how they make themselves a little house and rustle up food and there are some colourful pictures by the original artist - E. H.

Davie. In order to cover as much as possible the book also contains samples of Blyton younger-reader characters. Bom the little drummer boy is one and there's a report on the time that he visits his aunt in Ho-Ho village and his great friend, Skipper Heave-Ho, also makes an appearance. The other character is almost as revered as the Famous Five because he enjoyed immense success especially with smaller children when he came onto the scene in 1949. His name is Noddy and he's a little wooden spring-headed doll who is a colourful dresser although he doesn't seem to change his clothes very often ï¿½ only when he goes swimming or gets into bed. There's a two-page picture story about his altercation with a wooden horse because you can't fit much more into a book that is already bursting at the seams with wholesome reading matter. Despite that, there's yet another two-pager and this one shows Noddy experiencing a typical day and it gives us a good insight into his routine.

Enid Blyton's four clubs for children are touched on, there are several short stories, a two-act play, more poems, more nature, more puzzles, more "What to do on a rainy afternoon. " It's all crammed in somehow and helps justify the description of a "Dip In Book" - crowned at the end by a categorized list of the books. She wrote many more of course but you can get a very good indication of what exists when you scan the titles. To buy a copy of The Big Enid Blyton Book, you could search the second hand stores or, in this day and age, employ the book-finding services on the Internet and this can include the auctions that often yield exactly what one is after. There are several full-page colour illustrations. The picture inside the cover is a montage of various characters sailing on the river. Included are the Famous Five, Barnabas Martin with his friendly little monkey, Mr. Pink-Whistle, Noddy and his pal Big-Ears of course. The featured policeman looks too friendly to be Mr. Goon so maybe it's Mr.

Plod from the Noddy books and the plump youth getting into a boat with his dog has to be Fatty. I guess that's Kiki flying around by the tree, and the two extra youths on the island could be anyone. Penn Road where Green Hedges (Enid Blyton's home) was is in Buckinghamshire. In March of 1968 I visited the place but I thought it would be rather cheeky of me to walk up to the door and ring the bell because you should always give famous people a little notice when you desire to call. Enid Blyton was such a big name and for all I knew, she could have been having tea and biscuits with her publisher at that very moment or she could have been in the bath or even taking a nap. Furthermore, she may have not been inside because this was the year when she sadly left us after being in care. I looked at the rambling edifice and surveyed the gardens and then ten or so years later when I visited again I found it had disappeared. Nearby, there was a cul-de-sac named Blyton Close.

Speaking of handy words like Bong as in "Bongawah" ï¿½ there was also Bong the Brownie and Bong the dragon and Bong Castle in other Blyton tales. Kiki is a parrot that belongs to Jack Trent who is one of the children in The Mountain of Adventure. The bird is blessed with almost human qualities and is probably one of the most well remembered characters because of her expressive personality. I think parrots look more "parroty" when sporting a crest and maybe Stuart Tresilian, the artist, thought that as well so this female bird has one. Then again it might be a female who wants to be a male. The Mr. Pink-Whistle stories have original Dorothy Wheeler pictures and there's also an extra tale illustrated by that well-known Blyton artist. It's about James Jonathan Brown who meets up with a wizard. The Mr. Twiddle pictures are by the original artist as well ï¿½ Hilda McGavin. The Enid Blyton Bedside Books of which there are about a dozen are a series with an excellent selection of short stories plus poems and puzzles that are well illustrated and with added colour that brightens everything up.

There are one or two items taken from these books including a whole story from the Twelfth Bedside Book entitled 'The Four Wise Men and the Servant'. "In the summer time I write mostly in my garden, my typewriter on my knee. I watch the goldfish jumping in the ponds ï¿½ they are so tame they will feed out of my fingers. My two cats come with me and dab at the water, shaking their paws in disgust when they feel the wetness. They are with me at this moment, solemnly lying beside me, watching my busy fingers ... ah, one has leapt down to chase a butterfly. Now they have both gone indoors and the garden birds will soon come flying down again. The birds nest everywhere in my garden in spite of the cats. Blackbirds, thrushes, chaffinches, hedge sparrows, wrens, starlings - what an array I see when I feed them in the mornings!

I could write a whole book about the small visitors, feathered and furred (or prickled like the hedgehog) who live secretly and happily in the garden of Green Hedges." Enid Blyton | British author | Britannica.com British author Alternative Title: Enid Mary Blyton Enid Blyton Enid Blyton, in full Enid Mary Blyton (born August 11, 1897, East Dulwich, London , England —died November 28, 1968, Hampstead, London), prolific and highly popular British author of stories, poems, plays, and educational books for children. Enid Blyton, 1962. Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy 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.

Learn More in these related articles: Noddy and His Friends by Enid Blyton - AbeBooks Noddy and His Friends by Enid Blyton You Searched For: Results (1 - 30) of 40 1 ISBN 10: 0563368594 ISBN 13: 9780563368595 Used Paperback Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Penguin Character Books Ltd, 1993. Paperback. Book Condition: Used; Very Good. Dispatched, from the UK, within 48 hours of ordering. Though second-hand, the book is still in very good shape. Minimal signs of usage may include very minor creasing on the cover or on the spine.

Bookseller Inventory # CHL1619801 ISBN 10: 0563368594 ISBN 13: 9780563368595 Used ISBN 10: 0563368594 ISBN 13: 9780563368595 Used Paperback Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Penguin Character Books Ltd, 1993. Paperback. Book Condition: Very Good. Very Good: a copy that has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Most items will be dispatched the same or the next working day. Bookseller Inventory # mon0003079076 ISBN 10: 0563368594 ISBN 13: 9780563368595 Used Destination, Rates & Speeds Item Description: Penguin Character Books Ltd 18/03/1993, 1993. Book Condition: Good.

This book is in good or better condition. It has no tears to the pages and no pages will be missing from the book. The spine of the book is still in great condition and the front cover is generally unmarked. It has signs of previous use but overall is in really nice, tight condition. Shipping is normally same day from our UK warehouse. We offer a money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. Bookseller Inventory # 9053-9780563368595 Kate Forsyth | enid blyton Tweets by @KateForsyth Sunny Stories - Enid Blyton wins through One of the most crowded rooms at the Sydney Writers Festival this year was, ironically, devoted to an author that was not even a guest at the festival. This was of course J.K. Rowling, the single mum whose Harry Potter books have catapulted her to outrageous fame and fortune. For decades the literary establishment has been blaming TV, video games, the Internet, MTV and McDonalds for the demise of reading in the young. Few have wondered whether reading has gone out of fashion because the books published have simply not been what anyone wants to read. J.K.

Rowling has single-handedly reanimated the love of reading in the young quite simply because she has brought back the magic art of storytelling. As William Colvin, the eleven-year-old who effortlessly eclipsed the panel's stellar line-up of writers, academics and bibliophiles, said, Rowling's work is "exhilarating". She makes you gasp and shiver and smile and wince and catch your breath in fearful suspense. She makes you wish her world was real. To me, the Harry Potter books have all the verve and wit and excitement of the books I loved to read as a child. And though J.K. Rowling has rightly been compared with C. S. Lewis, Roald Dahl and E. Nesbit, the author she reminds me of most is the author I loved most passionately as an eight year old. Enid Blyton For quite a few years, nothing gave me such a thrill as being given a new Famous Five book. Since there were 21 in the Famous Five series, my family found choosing Christmas and birthday presents a breeze. I daydreamed about exploring secret passages, thwarting smugglers, discovering buried treasure and having a dog called Timmy.

My sister and I used to fight over who would get to be George, the girl-who-was-as-good-as-a-boy. Confessing to all this is actually quite hard. Blyton has been sneered at for so many years. One critic described her as "colourless, dead and totally undemanding"; another as "slow poison" (ouch!). If one wants to be taken seriously, one does not admit to a childish love of Enid Blyton. Let alone to still enjoying her as a grownup. But if Scholastic can issue 'adult' editions of Rowling's books that dominate bestselling lists all over the world, I cannot be alone in my love of fantastical adventure stories liberally spiced with mysterious castles, secret chambers, quick-witted child heroes and animals with an uncanny prescience of danger. (I know I am not alone here. Liz Hurley reportedly took refuge in her Enid Blyton books after the ignominious scandal involving Hugh, a car and a black prostitute. But that's a whole other story.) Reading Blyton as a grownup is rather like eating a family size block of chocolate – you know you shouldn't but it feels good anyway.

Of course, I don't have the same voluptuous abandonment into the story that I did as a child. Blyton's work has not been described as a vast wardrobe of Freudian slips for nothing. Reading about Julian and Dick coming over all queer gives one a quite different frisson than it did when I was eight. Blyton's unashamedly blatant snobbery grates nowadays too. As a child I did not notice her prejudices, however. What I remember most vividly – and felt quite envious about – is how happily the children's mother would wave them off on their latest adventure, apparently unconcerned that a gang of desperate crooks had just broken out of gaol. But grown-ups are only so much background furniture in Blyton books. They were good for supplying high tea when required, but otherwise conveniently absent at times of crisis. Which, of course, brings us back to Harry Potter, the most famous literary orphan since David Copperfield. For what is most striking about Rowling's books is that they, like Blyton's, give children a chance to be powerful. Parental authority is universally absent in the work of both writers, and adults are either outwitted or mocked.

As one critic famously wrote in a review of Blyton's The Sea of Adventure, 'What hope has a band of desperate men against four children?' What is most interesting about the extraordinary success of the Harry Potter books is that it comes at a time when the almost universal derision towards Blyton is being replaced with a new degree of critical and popular interest. Writers who have unashamedly acknowledged their early love of Blyton include Melvyn Bragg, Ken Follett, Hanif Kureishi, and Booker Prize winner Keri Hulme (who, like me, wrote a Enid Blyton rip-off at the age of seven). Most tellingly, the work of Blyton is finally the subject of an in-depth revisionism, published recently in the UK as Enid Blyton and the Mystery of Children's Literature. David Rudd, a senior lecturer at Bolton Institute, has examined the life and work of Blyton with particular emphasis on the fact that, despite the storm of adult negativity, Blyton remains the most popular children's author ever.

To date, her books have sold over 300 million copies (dream on, Rowling!), and have been made into TV series, films, radio and stage plays, fun parks, animated cartoons, and puppet shows. She has never gone out of print. "Why does a writer accused of being ... snobbish, sexist and racist ... continue to fascinate in our multicultural world? To fascinate not only in France, Germany and Australia, but also in Malaysia, Russia and Japan, and in languages such as Catalan and Tamil?" Rudd asks. Why is it every report of Blyton being banned results in a mad rush to buy her books, causing her sales to skyrocket at a time when she was supposedly anathema to any right-thinking member of the book-buying public? Rudd has a number of theories to explain the Blyton-bashing, but the most compelling is that many of her most virulent critics never actually read any of her work, simply scanning a few books to find fuel for their pre-existing sociopolitical bandwagons. His research is quite startling at times. Take Noddy, for example. Noddy books were banned for many years, ostensibly because of their racism.

Critics condemned Blyton for "habitually presenting (golliwogs) ... in evil and menacing roles", thereby giving children a negative impression of black people. Blyton herself protested that she depicted more bad teddies than golliwogs. Statistically she was right. A close examination of the Noddy books shows that golliwogs were wicked in only one story, out of twenty-four books in total, with the real villains more likely to be monkeys or goblins. Nonetheless, the Noddy books became such an active signifier of racism that the mere mention of the name could provoke a ban, as happened with a production of David Wood's play Noddy in 1993. In the sanitised, homogenised versions of the books on sale now, all the golliwogs have been replaced by goblins, presumably because there is no racial group that can be offended by them. Noddy and Big Ears, who once liked to share a bed, now live in separate establishments.

The BBC, producer of the animated TV series, introduced a new character, Dinah Doll, who it describes as a "black, assertive, ethnic minority female." Because of – or perhaps in spite of - all this, Noddy generates annual sales of more than $80 million in Britain alone and, in the US, is more popular than Sesame Street. In actual fact, a close reading of Blyton's books show that overtly racist attitudes are less prevalent than in the work of many of her contemporaries, including Aldous Huxley, Grahame Greene and T.S. Eliot. Blyton was writing at a time when race and class prejudices were deeply and widely held. The Second World War was just ending and the Cold War just beginning. Foreigners were regarded with suspicion by most British people and very few ever travelled outside their own country (Blyton herself only ever left Britain once and she did not enjoy the experience). Indeed, compared to many of her peers, Blyton's characters held rather liberal views.

For example, in Five Have A Wonderful Time (1952) a circus character remarks 'Us-folk and you-folk don't mix.' Julian responds, 'There's a lot of that kind of feeling about these days, and it's so silly. We're all the same under the skin.' Rudd also takes issue with the accusations of sexism. Of all the slurs and slanders, this was the one that always troubled me the most. I read thousands of books as a child, and yet George of the Famous Five lives most vividly in my memory - the tomboy who refused to let the boys push her around, the girl who could out-swim, out-climb and out-wit anyone. The critic Bob Dixon has described George as "a very bad case of ... penis-envy", yet compare her to the girls in most classic children's literature and she shines like a feminist beacon (think of Becky in Tom Sawyer. Urk!) In fact, Blyton's books are filled with passionate, independent girls who fight desperately against being straitjacketed in normal gender roles. Even Anne, normally dismissed as the typical domesticated female, has her own power which often takes her brothers by surprise.

Also, as Rudd points out, George's behaviour would not appear half so subversive without the contrast of sweet little Anne. It has been suggested by Blyton's biographer Barbara Stone that the character of George was in fact modelled upon Blyton herself. Born in 1897, Blyton was a passionate, hot-tempered girl who adored her father and fought angrily against her mother, who did her best to turn her into a model turn-of-the-century girl. Her father left when she was a young teenager and this was to be the secret grief of Blyton's life. She told no-one her parents were divorced, not even her best friend. When she ran away from home as a young teenager, she concealed her acrimonious relations with her mother from her friends and employers, who all thought her mother had died (when she did at last die, many years later, Blyton refused to attend the funeral). Blyton created a sunny façade to hide behind, maintaining the mask to the very end of her life. She trained as a Froebels teacher and then began to write a magazine for children, called appropriately enough Sunny Stories.

Despite many affectionate references to her husband in Sunny Stories, there's not one single clue that the husband in the early editions was not the same man as the husband in the later editions. Blyton's adulterous affairs, her bitter breakup and divorce, and her quick re-marriage did not rate one single mention, though Blyton continued to publish the weekly paper without a single hiccup. Perhaps because Blyton always painted her life as being bathed in sunshine, there has in recent years been much fascination with the darker shadows. Her daughter Imogen published a tell-all book about her childhood which revealed, among other things, that Blyton's two daughters were never allowed to see their real father, despite years of pleading on both sides. A Secret Lives documentary lingered with relish upon Blyton's frigid relations with her mother, her affairs and bitter divorce, and her overly intense friendship with her children's nurse, Dorothy Richards, which may have been a sexual one. The tarnishing of the Blyton myth has done nothing to affect her sales. Thirty-three years after her death, she is still chosen by children as one of their all-time favourite authors.

There are thousands of fan websites and first editions of her books reach astronomical prices (especially books starring golliwogs!) To explain her enduring popularity, Rudd places her work strongly within an Homeric tradition of oral storytelling, where the audience are spellbound by the visual, sensual aspects of the tales, by their sense of immediacy, their humour, action and suspense. Rudd then shows how contempt for the more intuitive, spontaneous and simplistic oral tradition reaches as far back as Plato. In The Republic, Plato criticises Homer's work for being, at best, frivolous and at worst, dangerous. He sees it as a 'crippling of the mind', a 'species of mental poison and an enemy of the truth.' Sounds eerily familiar, doesn't it? This Platonian view of literature has defined the way critics look at books for centuries. It has resulted in a general contempt for the art of story-telling as mere entertainment and escape. This century has been particularly guilty of demanding the depiction of grim reality as the only criteria for quality. Blame the existentialists, the Angry Young Men, the deconstructionists and the dirty realists. Blame Hiroshima and the Holocaust.

Whatever the reason, the fact remains that there has been little room for whimsy and wonder, frivolity or fancy. Particularly not in children's literature. Children's writers have a stern duty to teach the young the hard lessons of life. Don't they? No room for illicit midnight feasts in the dormitory or hunting for treasure in secret passages. No room for wishing-chairs or flying broomsticks or wardrobes that led into magical lands. No room for children defeating the baddies by the sheer force of their own wit and courage. In December 1975, the Times Literary Supplement wrote "the past fifteen years has seen a turgid wave of problem books, bombarding children with facts on abortion, menstruation, racism, mental and physical handicaps, divorce, adolescent hang-ups, violence, religion and so forth. No area has remained sacred; but style, imagination and storytelling have too often been sacrificed to the golden calf of truth." That was written twenty-six years ago. Anyone interested in children's literature knows that was just the beginning of the tsunami of dirty realist books that outdid themselves in telling children about the nastier, more nauseating aspects of human nature.

It surely should be no surprise that there has contemporaneously been a sharp decline in literacy levels. Children aren't interested in reading, we're told. They want video games. Hollywood blast-fests. Toys that talk and walk and squawk. They want instant gratification and they want it now. I worship at the J.K. Rowling altar because she has proved all those experts wrong. Harry Potter has introduced literally millions of children to the incomparable joy of the world of books, a gift that can never be taken away from them. For many critics of Blyton, one of the primary causes for concern was the sheer volume of her work. Blyton is the most prolific author of all time, writing 700 books, 10,000 short stories and hundreds of magazine article and columns. She could write up to 10,000 words in a day. This meant she could write a Famous Five adventure in a week if she put her mind to it. Many worried that once a child became addicted to Blyton, he or she would read nothing else until they progressed - "if ever, on such a spoon-fed diet" - to adult literature.

However, all the evidence goes to show that children who are given the gift of reading for pleasure read voraciously. They read everything they can lay their grubby little mitts on. They read all their lives. I certainly have. I may read Enid Blyton in bed while devouring a family size block of chocolate, but I also read James Joyce, Charlotte Brontë and Leo Tolstoy, unlike most people I know. In Rowling's world, as in Blyton's, children are given a landscape in which to roam freely, celebrating their world and finding a space in which to be heroes. Without first imagining oneself as a hero, how can one ever become one? I cannot wait to introduce my little boys to the magical world of Blyton, as well as those of Nesbit, Lewis, Tolkien, Dahl and Rowling. I cannot wait to watch them wander in worlds where hobbits can be heroes and children can change the world.

In the meantime, I can still luxuriate in the guilty, sensuous pleasure of reading Blyton for the pure joy of reliving my own free, joyous childhood (though maybe her publishers need to re-issue them in monochromatic 'adult' covers before I'll read them on the train!) This article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper in June 2001.

Question: In the stories by Enid Blyton, what is the name of the best friend of Big Ears?
Answer: Noddy