Why Enid Blyton is still the queen of children’s books
As a child, I couldn’t get enough of Enid Blyton’s books. From the moment I discovered the Malory Towers series, set in a girls’ boarding school on a windswept Cornish clifftop, I was hooked. My strict grandmother called me a spendthrift for frittering all my pocket money (the princely sum of two shillings and sixpence a week) on paperback editions of Malory Towers, St Clare’s, The Naughtiest Girl and the Famous Five but I was too engrossed to care. Blyton’s first book, a slim volume of poetry called Child Whispers, was published in 1922 and she went on to publish more than 800 titles before her death in 1968. In
