Essay: The mystery of Enid Blyton’s enduring appeal in India

Despite the gender stereotyping and the matter-of-fact racism in her work, Enid Blyton's books were immensely popular with many generations of Indian children

When I’m in the mood for comfort reading, only one author will do: Enid Blyton.

Author Enid Blyton (11 August 1897-28 November 1968) (https://www.enidblyton.co.uk/nid)

My first Blyton, a woebegone hand-me-down from an older cousin, reeled me in. Growing up at a time when books weren’t as easily accessible as they are now, my best friend and I made it a point to gobble up our lunch and quickly head to the school library.

Most of Blyton’s fiction comprises mystery or adventure stories, but there are many books set in

“Long before JK Rowling’s Harry Potter cast a spell over generations of children, Enid Mary Blyton had made reading magical” (urbanbuzz/Shutterstock)

The English author wrote more than 700 books and 4,500 short stories, with her work being translated into 90 languages and selling over 600 million copies. She believed that writing for children “is an art in itself, and a most interesting one.” Her formula was simple: Easy language, simplistic viewpoints, moral lessons, and lots of fun.

Despite her recent fall from grace, she remains popular across India, consistently ranking among the top-selling children’s authors.

Thomas Abraham, managing director of Hachette, India, which distributes Blyton’s books in the subcontinent, told the BBC that Blyton was “one of the few author brands whose work remains unshakable”.

But how did the author who only wrote about English children and their extremely English lifestyle amass such a huge following in the Indian subcontinent?

Was it because her books created a variety of magical worlds where any kind of child could seek refuge?

Author Sandip Roy, who believes that Blyton colonised the subcontinent with “crumpets and make-believe”, in an op-ed wrote for millions of fans: “Enid Blyton opened up my mind to the possibility of another world beyond the one we saw around us. In that world toys came alive at night when the children had gone to bed. Pixies, elves and brownies lived under the dew-laden flowers at the bottom of the garden.”

For naysayers, who like Dick in The Folk of the Faraway Tree said, “I don’t believe in things like that – fairies or brownies or magic or anything. It’s old-fashioned,” Bessie had this to say: “Well, we must be jolly old-fashioned then, because we not only believe in the Faraway Tree and love our funny friends there, but we go to see them too -- and we visit the lands at the top of the Tree as well!”

“Author Sandip Roy believes that Blyton colonised the subcontinent with ‘crumpets and make-believe’” (https://www.enidblyton.co.uk)

Perhaps what I liked best is that while the stories featured characters around my age, they were in settings vastly different from my own and doing things that I possibly couldn’t: Sneaking off for midnight feasts, planning secret club meetings, rowing boats out to an island to catch criminals, solving mysteries before the silly cop could, or running away from home.

Living a cloistered life in an army cantonment, the mysteries, adventures, and family stories opened up a whole new world, one that got me. A pre-teen George may have been ranting on my behalf when she said, “It wasn’t a bit of good fighting grown-ups. They could do exactly as they liked.”

I wanted to go exploring with Barney who was good at exploring roofs and believed “you never know when that kind of thing comes in useful”. I wanted to run away with Penny, Mike, Nora and Jack to the little island that “seemed to float on the dark lake waters”. I wanted to find the little cave-like space behind the stream that Anne could use as the larder to keep the Famous Five’s supplies. I wished I could help myself to one of Fatty’s many disguises and annoy the exasperating Mr Goon.

If wishes were horses, I thought… but if they weren’t I was happy to read about them.

The fact that Blyton’s books put me at the centre, with adults at the periphery, seemed exciting to a tween. After all, Aunt Fanny and Uncle Quentin only came into the picture once the crime had been solved. Miss Pepper, the family retainer charged with taking the children down to the sea, never really knew what Snubby got up to. And even Superintendent Jenks stepped in after Fatty and his pals had tied up all the loose ends.

“Blyton’s descriptions single-handedly made generations of children crave food that they had neither seen nor heard of.” (https://www.enidblyton.co.uk)

And then there was the food, great big “lashings” of it.

Blyton’s descriptions single-handedly made generations of children crave food that they had neither seen nor heard of. Blancmange, potted meat, anchovy paste, tinned sardines, pork pies, jam tarts, buttered crumpets, liquorice… we had no idea what she was talking about but we wanted it much, much more than the samosa, upma, poha, and rajma-chawal we were served.

In The Secret of Moon Castle, the housekeeper offers “potted meat sandwiches, tomato sandwiches and egg sandwiches” and “buttered scones, some ginger buns and some boiled sweets, too. And then, there were bottles of iced lemonade”.

Darrell Rivers and her friends, in Upper Fourth at Malory Towers , enjoy “great chunks of new-made cream cheese, potted meat, ripe tomatoes grown in Mrs Lucy’s brother’s greenhouse, gingerbread cake fresh from the oven, shortbread, a great fruit cake with almonds crowding the top, biscuits of all kinds, and six jam sandwiches!”

Even her descriptions of ordinary food made us salivate. “A bag of ripe tomatoes and a basket of glossy plums”, “lashings of hard-boiled eggs”, large chocolate sponges with a “thick cream filling”, “hot, new-made scones, sweet and buttery,” “gingerbread straight out of the oven”, and “an enormous tureen of new potatoes, all gleaming with melted butter”.

The food descriptions inspired Josh Sutton to write Five Go Feasting: Famously Good Recipes (2018), a selection of 80 recipes from the Famous Five series, with illustrations and quotes from the stories.

Uncovering Blyton’s past

Blyton was born on August 11, 1897, in East Dulwich, South London. She spent her childhood in Beckenham, Kent, with her parents and two younger brothers, Hanly and Carey.

Her father, Thomas, had a huge influence on her life, instilling in her a lifelong love for nature. He had a loving relationship with his daughter with whom he shared dark hair, brown eyes, and a love for life and knowledge. Blyton had a turbulent relationship with her mother, Theresa, who was neither creative nor artistic, and expected her daughter to help with household chores. The child, not very domesticated, resented this, especially as her mother gave her sons a lot more freedom (ironical that she herself created a domestic gender divide in her books!).

As a child, she read Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, and Louisa M Alcott’s Little Women. The breakdown of her parents’ marriage had a huge impact on her, especially since the mother forced the children to pretend, if asked, that their father was merely “away on a visit”.

Enid Blyton’s autobiography (https://www.enidblytonsociety.co.uk/)

In her autobiography, The Story of My Life (1952), Blyton writes that, from an early age, she “liked making up stories better than I liked doing anything else”.

Her first publication was a poem that appeared in a children’s magazine when she was only 14; in 1917, another of her poems was published in Nash’s Magazine.

She routinely submitted her work to publishers, but received countless rejection slips. But that didn’t deter her. “It is partly the struggle that helps you so much, that gives you determination, character, self-reliance — all things that help in any profession or trade, and most certainly in writing,” she wrote.

In the late 1930s, she wrote the Adventures of the Wishing-Chair and The Enchanted Wood, the first book in the Faraway Tree series that created a magic tree inspired by the Norse mythology that had fascinated her as a child.

Blyton’s first full-length adventure novel is one of my personal favourites: The Secret Island, featuring the characters of Jack, Mike, Peggy, and Nora, and described as a “Robinson Crusoe-style adventure on an island in an English lake”. This template – running off to a lake to escape the real world - was also the plot of Five Run Away Together and The Riddle of the Rajah’s Ruby.

A UK postage stamp, circa 1997, featuring Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven series. (Nuntiya/Shutterstock)

She wrote many other series and books that have delighted children down the decades: the Secret Series, Amelia Jane, Malory Towers, St Clare’s, Naughtiest Girls, Secret Seven, Five Find-Outers, Barney Mysteries, Brer Rabbit, Mary Mouse, Noddy, and a huge collection of fairytales. She was a prolific writer, sometimes producing 50 books in a year.

Amid the many adventures and escapades, Blyton was adept at the countless life lessons she slipped into her stories.

In Mr Galliano’s Circus we learn that “the best way to treat obstacles is to use them as stepping-stones. Laugh at them, tread on them, and let them lead you to something better”. In Six Cousins At Mistletoe Farm, we are told that “there never is any escape from difficulties, never. They have to be faced and fought”. In the follow-up, Six Cousins Again, we learn another important life lesson: “Hatred is so much easier to win than love - and so much harder to get rid of.”

The fact that Blyton came from a broken family led her to eulogise the family unit. The Mackenzies in The Six Bad Boys, the Longfields in Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm, the Jacksons in The Family at Red-Roofs, the Farrells in House-at-the-Corner — all showcase her ideal of the happy, united family.

My favourite life lesson comes from a book that isn’t as popular, House-at-the Corner, in which the Farrell family falls into adversity.

On a particularly vexing day, Michael gives his friends, twins Delia and David, solid advice that I took to heart as a 11-year-old: “Pray to God, sailor, but row for the shore”.

“When you or your family are in trouble, pray to God for help - but do your bit too, and row hard for the shore. You go on praying to God - but do all you can to help your father and mother,” he says. The Farrell’s fortunes are at their lowest ebb, but troubles are put in their place when each member of the family comes together and does their bit.

A used postage stamp printed in Britain celebrating Enid Blyton and the Famous Five Books, circa 1997. (YANGCHAO/Shutterstock)

Decoding the present

Blyton’s books remained popular with her target audience, but as time passed, her stories were seen as “full of racism, sexism, class bias, and lacking merit”.

In 1963, she was snubbed by St Pancras libraries. “We consider her books are generally sloppily written. They do nothing to add to a child’s imagination or mental horizon.” Her books were in 1964 removed from Nottingham libraries for not having a “sufficiently wide vocabulary”.

A newspaper in 1966 ran an article accusing her work of racism, referring to The Little Black Doll in which Sambo, hated by his owner and other toys owing to his “ugly black face”, runs away. He is only welcomed back home after a shower of rain washes its face clean.

Blyton faced a BBC ban for almost three decades as a “second-rater” whose work lacked literary value.

In the late 1950s, her health began to deteriorate. It was clear that she was suffering from dementia by the early 1960s - she was easily confused, suffered memory lapses, and her mind was no longer as sharp as it once was.

Her last two books, The Man Who Stopped to Help and The Boy Who Came Back, were published in 1965. Both were retellings of Bible stories.

She was admitted to a nursing home in the summer of 1968 and died peacefully in her sleep that November, aged 71.

Mr Plod, Big Ears and Noddy from Enid Blyton’s Noddy series. (urbanbuzz/Shutterstock)

But the criticism didn’t stop. In 1975, a UK Schools Council report on children’s reading placed Blyton’s books in the category of “non-quality books”. She was also excluded from lists of recommended reading published by national Library Associations and by the National Book League.

In recent years, her fall from grace has continued, amid accusations of sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, stereotypes, limited vocabulary, and more.

In 2021, UK charity English Heritage linked Blyton’s work to “racism and xenophobia”, updating the blue plaque placed at her former home in Chessington where she started to develop her storytelling skills.

Amid the plaque furore, actor Pooja Bhatt tweeted: “Like millions of readers whose imagination was fuelled by her books, there goes my childhood, I guess.”

To me, it seems a woke attack on our childhood pleasures since it’s vital to remember that Blyton was writing when “inclusivity” and “gender neutral” weren’t part of our vocabulary. To attack her for not having thoughts, values, and beliefs that didn’t exist back then seems unfair.

Yes, her characters are unidimensional, gender roles are messed up, there is racism and xenophobia. No adult reader can ignore this. But the fact remains that a child reading her books wasn’t taking in these overtures; they were enjoying the strong characters and fascinating adventures.

“Even her descriptions of ordinary food made us salivate. “A bag of ripe tomatoes and a basket of glossy plums”, “lashings of hard-boiled eggs”, large chocolate sponges with a “thick cream filling”, “hot, new-made scones, sweet and buttery,” “gingerbread straight out of the oven”, and “an enormous tureen of new potatoes, all gleaming with melted butter”. The food descriptions inspired Josh Sutton to write Five Go Feasting: Famously Good Recipes (2018)” (Amazon)

Former Children’s Laureate Anne Fine defended Blyton, telling BBC Radio 4 that the author was the product of a Victorian childhood, where sexism and racism ran rife, and her books reflected that.

She called Blyton a fine storyteller, saying: “In times of falling reading levels and limitless other distractions, we grasp at any author who has that turn-the-page quality. And for reasons that may remain entirely mysterious to reading adults, she certainly has that.”

And that’s why I, and thousands like me across the Indian subcontinent, are content with the world that Blyton created.

Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle.