blyton

By just reading Enid Blyton you can't think in terms of metaphors or similes or puns etc.

It didn't take much to send up Blyton in The Comic Strip Presents - Five Go Mad in Dorset [1].

And later move on to kids / teens novels (I'd recommend British authors like Enid Blyton and JK Rowling).

This just reinforces the impression that the Tory party is stuck in some kind of fantasy role-playing game based on Enid Blyton books and Billy Bunter.

I'm particularly aggrieved by the publishers who try to modern-wash Enid Blyton stories.

Enid Blyton has been a brand for decades.

Growing up in Malaysia, most of my English was initially mastered from a gigantic pile of Enid Blyton books my family had lying around after the British occupation.

Sometimes this causes unexpected issues the other way round, such as with old English children's books by authors like Enid Blyton that these days are much more popular in Indonesia.

Take a look at any recent Enid Blyton book: there's lots of references to the trademark but no claim that the text was written by a natural person with that name.

But I suspected--before seeing the name explicitly mentioned--that Enid Blyton is probably one of the prolific authors that would trigger various alarm bells for some modern audiences.

There was indeed a huge backlash in the UK, amongst authors and the public, when publishers sought to edit classic children's books by Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton to make them politically correct.

However their ability to think is still limited to merely the thought processes of an author for children ( Disclaimer: I have no intention of belittling Enid Blyton here).

Wartime Enid Blyton books called it the “Crooked Cross” (which was vaguely mystifying to 8 yo me, 30 years after the end of the war and in the pacific).

As a kid I used to consume Enid Blyton books without really being aware I was reading them or how much I had read, I was just "inside" them.

This reference to Enid Blyton in that article seems somewhat misleading: "A month later, it was announced Enid Blyton's works would be expurgated as well." It's my understanding that the books released under the Enid Blyton trademark have been continuously revised ever since they were first published, which was long before 2023.

Enid Blyton was a bit fucking near the knuckle though, and I mean I remember reading her books in the mid-to-late 1970s as a very young child in her target demographic and thinking "woah come on, that's a bit much".

For example, take a case where someone knows how to think, and has read relatively easy children's authors like Enid Blyton.

In the last two months there's been stories about Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, a couple of others and now Agatha Christie.

I feel they filled that generations need for an Enid Blyton-style series of kids getting into scrapes, nothing more.