Britain’s librarians must have been frowning last summer when results of a nationwide poll of favourite writers were announced in the press. In top place, beating out Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens, was a children’s author their ilk has gleefully detested for 40 years now, the implausibly prolific and popular Enid Blyton. The author of an astonishing 700-odd books—which still translate to eight million copies a year in sales—Blyton is perhaps the most popular author you’ve never heard of. Her name may mean little to North American readers, but in France, in Germany, in countries as far-flung as Australia, Portugal, Singapore and India, Blyton, who wrote mostly in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, remains not merely the beloved author of such series as Noddy, The Famous Five, The Magic Faraway Tree, and Malory Towers, but a rite of passage, an icon conjuring the magic of childhood.

In the U.K., she’s also a lightning rod for controversy, and after the poll results were announced, there was carping. Anthony Horowitz, writer of the TV drama Foyle’s War, complained in the Daily Telegraph that Britons were “being asked to genuflect in front of a fossil.” The children’s author Philip Pullman compared her stories to “mechanically recovered meat.” They’re only Blyton’s most recent detractors. The aforementioned librarians viewed her as a hack and simpleton who kept kids from serious reading. Progressives got her books banned from libraries on charges of racism, sexism, middle-class-ism; one writer called her work neo-fascist. And she didn’t find much truck with the other side either. The conservative British journalist Colin Welch famously excoriated Noddy, a little wooden fellow who lives with his friend Big Ears in Toyland, as an imbecile, “an unnaturally priggish, sanctimonious . . . witless, spiritless, snivelling, sneaking doll.”

Continue…