Remember ‘The Secret Seven’, ‘The Famous Five’ and ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’? The author of these books, Enid Blyton sold over 600 million copies of her books and wrote about 40 books in her lifetime.
Last night, I watched ‘Enid’ the film based on her life and I must say that the depiction of Enid Blyton was rather sad. Though she was an admired children’s author among children – I loved her books as a child – she comes across as a rather odd lady with deep seated issues concerning her parents and the fact that her father left the family due to having an affair. The repercussions of this one tragic event in her childhood left her distraught and with a pining that never quite leaves her.
What struck me with this was that once she had married and had decided to have children, and couldn’t, the doctor told her that her uterus had stopped forming and was technically still at the stage of a 12 year old. She needed hormone therapy in order for her to have children. I find this interesting in a pyschological sense that subconciously she never wanted to grow up. One can also see this through the movie. How when things are difficult, she writes, and all her writing is about adventures, and picnics and all the good, fun things that children do.
As a mother she comes across as unavailable and cold, and when she and her first husband divorce, cannot see that by not allowing the children to see their father, that she is reliving her childhood. I find it interesting that she was so closed to the truth of her own childhood that it comes through while she is raising her own children. One scene in particular stands out, a group of children have won a competition to have a picnic with Enid. The children come to the house and have a whale of a time, but her own children have been banished to the nursery.
I found this movie sad and thought provoking, interesting and a little off putting. But one cannot change the fact that her books are well loved and adorn many a bookshelves around the world.
Enid Blyton died on the 28 November 1968, aged 71 after being inflicted with Alzheimer’s Disease.