aileth wrote:JoHobbit and coracle both recommended that I read some Enid Blyton, so I did some hunting and found a few
Secret Seven books. I've read one so far, and it was very enjoyable.
I don't know how much these books have been edited and reorganised, but I am not sure if I want to re-read everything from my childhood to find out, now. I've never read all the Secret Seven books, though I read almost all Five Find-outers, having borrowed them from the local council library when I finally left that boarding school I referred to in the
Silver Chair Reading Group.
For the remainder of my primary school days I loved to listen to a radio performance of all of those Five Find-outers stories before dinner and doing my homework. Of course we never got TV in Australia until 1956, and by and large, looking at TV was a treat for adults, not children, who were supposed to do their homework as well as washing up, which often took forever.
Another series of hers I really did like was the something or other Adventure series. (ie the
Castle of Adventure, the
Ship of Adventure etc). There was a boy in it, Philip, I think, who was the sort of person who had pets of all sorts of animals and I rather liked him.
aileth wrote:Enid Blyton! I've found most of my copies in Canada, though how they got here I couldn't say....Some people claim that Blyton is sexist and racist (didn't they claim that for another author we know?) and should be banned or censored. Personally, I find many of her books to have moral themes, such as honesty or kindness. Maybe that is why they would like to see them banned?
That is no mystery, as Canada is a Commonwealth country, same as Australia and New Zealand, and therefore the Canadian book trade may still have strong links with UK, where the copyright to Enid Blyton's books would still remain. Sometimes it is easier for me to get books from UK or USA than it is to get books from either New Zealand or Canada.
As for Enid Blyton, herself, I think you are referring to a series of critiques of children's literature during the 1970's and 1980's, which included attacks on Enid Blyton, in particular, as well as a bunch of other children's authors. Part of the antagonism here might have just a little to do with a growing Republican sentiment which wanted to discard what was perceived here as "colonialism", along with other social unrest.
I knew about that a bit, having trained as a librarian, myself. By that time Enid Blyton had passed away, and a lot more was known about her than when I was a child. Yes, people were objecting to some of her characters, invented in all innocence, and yes, I agree that her books have had moral themes of honesty or kindness. The trouble is, that Enid Blyton was rather heavy handed with her moralizing, and I can understand how people might have become a bit shirty because of it. Especially when her own life story didn't really show she practised what she preached, when she left her own parents in the lurch at a young age.
Recently, my eldest daughter moved back home, and so I had to have a general clean-out, including books I was surprised I still had. Such as Enid Blyton's tome,
Last term at Malory Towers, the very first chapter book which was given to me in 1956 when still at boarding school, myself. So I re-read it.
She did make some good points, especially about one girl, Jo, whose wealthy working class father positively encouraged her to behave badly. And another, Amanda, whose obsession with her own sporting prowess was the reason why she broke rules and ended up too injured to realize her dreams of Olympic glory. A third girl, Gwendolin, I found a bit more problematic, given that the girl's upper class expectations of life were all too usual for that time of history in UK, depending on father's income, and given Enid Blyton's alleged dismissive attitude to members of her own birth family.
I compared that book with another one, written by E.M.Channon,
Honour of the House, a pre-WW2 or 1950's boarding school novel, where the father of the protagonist had gone missing, where the main antagonist, a snobbish sort, spent her time at school - St Madoc - flaunting her wealthy family's connections and being rude to a demonised family of girls who, in the end, turned out to be far better people and have more powerful connections than that girl - Annabelle - could ever dream about. I think on the whole, that books written before C.S.Lewis' death in 1963 were written in a world of quickly changing social perceptions about racism and sexism that had only recently begun to matter to the activists who fought against these "isms".