11 August: Enid Blyton

Born on this date in 1897 was Enid Blyton, children's writer whose well known characters include known characters is Noddy, the Famous Five and the Secret Seven. Her work has been translated into nearly 90 languages.

1. Her first book was called Child Whispers, and was a 24-page collection of poems, published in 1922. It was illustrated by her schoolfriend, Phyllis Chase.
2. At school, she was good at sports - she became school tennis champion and captain of lacrosse. The only academic subject she did well in was writing. She could play the Piano well enough to consider a career in Music, but in the end, she chose writing. Her mother thought writing was a "waste of time and money". Since Enid did not get on with her mother this may have influenced her decision.
3. For a while after leaving school, Enid lived at Seckford Hall near Woodbridge in Suffolk. Seckford Hall, which had a haunted room and secret passageway.
4. Her manuscripts were rejected by publishers many times, which only made her more determined to succeed. She believed rejection made her more determined and self-reliant. Her perseverance paid off in the end, She is now the world's fourth most translated author, behind Agatha Christie, Jules Verne and William Shakespeare.
5. She married an editor at her publishing firm, Major Hugh Alexander Pollock in 1924. They had two daughters, Gillian and Imogen, but in time the marriage broke down. Enid had several affairs, including, according to a memoir written by her husband's second wife, a lesbian affair with one of her childrens' nannies. Eventually, she started an affair with Kenneth Fraser Darrell Waters. Pollock found out about it and wanted to file for divorce. Enid, not wanting her public image damaged by adultery, persuaded him to let her do the filing, and she'd allow him access to his daughters, However, according to the second wife's memoir, she went back on that and didn't allow him to contact the girls. She also bankrupted him by making sure he never worked in publishing again. Enid, meanwhile, married Darrell Waters.
6. She wrote so much so quickly (sometimes producing fifty books a year plus magazine and newspaper contributions) that people believed she'd hired ghost writers. Enid was upset by this and put an appeal in a children's magazine asking the kids to let her know if they heard these rumours. One child informed her that her school librarian was saying it, and the librarian was rapidly sued and forced to apologise. Enid Blyton's response to her critics was that she was uninterested in the views of anyone over the age of 12; that half the attacks on her work were motivated by jealousy and the rest came from "stupid people who don't know what they're talking about because they've never read any of my books".
7. She believed that the colour red acted as a mental stimulus for her, so she kept a red Moroccan shawl near her while she was writing.
8. She didn't just write fiction, either. She wrote educational texts (her day job was teaching) which were influential in the 1920s and '30s. These included The Teacher's Treasury (three volumes), Modern Teaching (six volumes), Pictorial Knowledge (ten volumes), and Modern Teaching in the Infant School (four volumes).
9. She wrote six books under another name, Mary Pollock, in 1940 - including Three Boys and a Circus and Children of Kidillin. These books were popular, too, to the extent that people said, "Enid Blyton had better look to her laurels". Her fans figured out who was really writing the books and complained to the publisher, who later re-issued them as Enid Blyton books.
10. Enid Blyton used her massive fan base to encourage children to get active supporting charities which supported animals and children. The largest of the clubs she was involved with was the Busy Bees, the junior section of the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals, which, after Blyton promoted it in the Enid Blyton Magazine, attracted 100,000 members in three years.