Enid Blyton — #100FavouriteAuthors

Childhood revisited

2 min readMay 18, 2017

Enid Blyton.

The name itself conjures up a warm, fuzzy childhood feeling. Look at her picture — she looks like that lovely grandmother, who’ll cook you a great dinner and then read you a bedtime story. I would call her the mother of all storytellers.

Speaking of mothers, my own introduced me to Enid Blyton.

Her personal favourites were the Malory Towers series and the St. Clare’s series. But she introduced me to ‘The Faraway Tree’ series, which included The Enchanted Wood, The Magic Faraway Tree, The Folk of the Faraway Tree and Up the Faraway Tree. I remember being spellbound by some of the characters, like Moon-Face, Silky the fairy, or even the Faraway Tree itself. The whole series is the story of 3 children — Jo, Bessie and Fanny — who move to a house near this large forest (the Enchanted Wood).

After that, there was no stopping. I read all her other characters — Amelia Jane, Mr. Twiddle, The Golliwogs et al. Reading Enid Blyton’s short stories was a daily ritual. In fact, I’d say my first English textbook was an Enid Blyton book. That was also the first story book I carried to school.

The one big miss, you’re probably thinking, is Noddy.

For some reason, I never really liked Noddy. I always thought of him as a discount Pinocchio. And people might lynch me for this, but I thought Noddy was the least imaginative of Enid Blyton’s writing. I know a lot of people love the character, but I guess he never was meant for me.

Her detective fiction series’ were decent, but nothing too great.

Famous Five and Secret Seven were great reads on a Sunday afternoon, but after a while they became all too predictable, even for children. And as a child I preferred Agatha Christie for detective fiction, so that was that.

But Enid Blyton was a big part of my English education when I was a child, and I will be eternally grateful to my mother for introducing me to her.

That’s it for favourite author #5.