The Real Enid Blyton by Nadia Cohen

October 17, 2022October 17, 202230 Comments

Like many children in Britain and other countries around the world, I grew up reading Enid Blyton. Although her books have attracted a lot of criticism for their outdated attitudes and a perceived lack of literary merit, I have lots of happy memories of solving crimes with the Five Find-Outers, going on adventures with the Famous Five and getting to know the girls of Malory Towers and St Clare’s. As a child, I never gave any thought to the author herself and what she may have been like as a wife, mother or friend, but I later became aware that she was allegedly not a very nice person and certainly not the loving, maternal figure her books would lead you to believe. She has been the subject of TV documentaries and a 2009 BBC drama starring Helena Bonham Carter as well as several biographies, including this one, The Real Enid Blyton, in which Nadia Cohen takes us through Enid’s life from birth to death and attempts to shed some light on the woman behind the stories.

Enid was born in East Dulwich, South London in 1897 and Cohen suggests that her character was shaped by the break-up of her parents’ marriage while she was in her early teens. Enid had a close, loving relationship with her father, Thomas Blyton, who instilled in her a love of reading, animals and nature, but she didn’t get on very well at all with her mother, Theresa. When Thomas left his wife for another woman, Theresa refused to agree to a divorce and insisted that his new living arrangements be kept secret in order to avoid bringing shame on the family. Enid was devastated and felt that her father had betrayed her by choosing someone else over her. As she grew into an adult, she would learn to detach herself from the people around her, ‘removing people from her life without a backward glance’, and would deal with anything unpleasant by simply pretending it hadn’t happened, things Cohen attributes to the emotional damage caused by her father’s departure.

Enid began to write after taking a teacher training course and working first as a teacher then as a private governess. She said, ‘It was the children themselves who taught me how to write. No adult can teach you that as they can.’ I was interested to read that early in her career she submitted an adult novel, The Caravan Goes On, to her agent but it was rejected and later reworked into her children’s book Mr Galliano’s Circus. If that novel had been accepted, I wonder whether she would have continued to write for adults rather than for children. However, that was not to be and apart from an adult play she wrote in the 1950s (which was also rejected), she concentrated on writing for the younger readers she understood so well. By the peak of her career in 1951, she produced thirty-seven books in that one year alone.

Despite Enid’s popularity with children she had never met, her own children seem to have felt neglected and unloved. Cohen provides plenty of evidence of this, sprinkling throughout the book quotes from Gillian and Imogen, Enid’s two daughters by her first husband, Hugh Pollock. Imogen described her mother as ‘arrogant, insecure and without a trace of maternal instinct. Her approach to life was childlike, and she could be spiteful, like a teenager’. Enid and Hugh divorced when the girls were still young children and she refused to let them have any further contact with their father – another example of cutting all her ties, but this time her children were made to suffer. Her second marriage, to the surgeon Kenneth Waters, was happier, but Enid’s relationship with Imogen in particular never improved. However, Cohen’s portrayal of Enid seems quite fair and balanced overall and she does acknowledge Enid’s good points, such as her energy, impressive work ethic and support for various charities. Most people, especially men, who encountered Enid in a professional capacity, tended to like her and commented on how agreeable and easy she was to work with.

Cohen also discusses some of the criticism directed at Enid’s work and the recent attempts of publishers to censor and ‘update’ her books, something I think many of us who were Blyton fans feel quite strongly about! It can’t be denied that her books did contain a lot of sexism, racism and snobbery, but some of the changes that were made just seem completely unnecessary:

The word jersey was replaced with jumper, frocks became dresses, mother and father were changed to mum and dad, fellow to man and peculiar to strange. The aim was to help young readers in contemporary society to relate more easily to the characters.

In The Faraway Tree stories Dick and Fanny were renamed Rick and Frannie, as what were common names in the 1950s had become vulgar slang in the 1990s…Dame Slap became Dame Snap, and scolded naughty children instead of spanking them. Mary and Jill of the Adventurous Four were updated to Pippa and Zoe…

Even before these recent controversies, Enid’s books had been banned by some libraries and by the BBC (until the 1950s), because of her ‘over simplified writing’ and ‘undemanding plots’, with one critic accusing her of poisoning the reading ability of children and another claiming children would become addicted to her books and would never go on to read adult literature. Enid’s response to all of this was that she didn’t care about the opinion of anyone over the age of twelve!

What do you think? Did you read Enid Blyton as a child? Have you read this or any other books about her life and work?

Thanks to Pen & Sword History for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.

Classics Club July Meme: Biographies

July 22, 20148 Comments

This month’s Classics Club Meme question is:

Have you ever read a biography on a classic author? If so, tell us about it. If you had already read works by this author, did reading a biography of his/her life change your perspective on the author’s writing? Why or why not? // Or, if you’ve never read a biography of a classic author, would you? Why or why not?

Looking through my list of books reviewed here on my blog, I can only see three or four biographies of classic authors that I’ve read in the last five years. I’ve also read some fictional biographies (such as The Taste of Sorrow by Jude Morgan) but they’re not quite the same thing! When I read a book, classic or otherwise, I do like to know some basic information about the author (whether they are male or female, which country they are from, how old they are, etc) but I can usually get that information from the book cover or ‘about the author’ page. Beyond that, I don’t usually feel any need to know every detail of the author’s life and prefer just to concentrate on enjoying their work.

One biography that I did enjoy was Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life. It didn’t leave me with a very good opinion of Dickens as a person, but it was interesting to see how people and events from his personal life inspired his fictional plots and characters. Having also read Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, which is another excellent book, I would like to read more of her work at some point, despite my usual lack of interest in reading biographies. Her book on Thomas Hardy sounds the most appealing to me, but I’ve been waiting until I’ve finished reading all of Hardy’s novels first.

Earlier this year I read The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William M. Clarke but although Collins is one of my favourite classic authors, I was a bit disappointed with this particular biography. There’s a lot of information on Collins’ private life (though to be fair, you would expect that from the title) but Clarke doesn’t spend much time discussing his writing. He does occasionally show how aspects of Wilkie’s personal life may have related to his work, but there’s not enough of this and when I reached the end of the book I didn’t feel I’d gained any real insights.

While I did learn a lot about Collins’ and Dickens’ lives from these two biographies, I can’t really say that they changed how I feel about their writing. For the purposes of this meme, a better book for me to mention here is probably the biography of Daphne, Angela and Jeanne du Maurier which I read last year – Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters by Jane Dunn. Although I had a few problems with this biography too (which I’ve explained in my review) I do think Jane Dunn did a good job of explaining how the girls’ childhood experiences and influences shaped their future careers. I’ve never read anything by Angela du Maurier, but I know that Daphne put a lot of herself into her writing and many of her novels include autobiographical elements – reading Dunn’s biography gave me a better appreciation of this.

Well, it seems I’ve found more to say on the subject of biographies than I’d expected! Do you enjoy reading biographies of classic authors? Which ones have you read?

The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë by Daphne du Maurier

June 17, 20149 Comments

I’ve been interested in reading this book since I read Daphne by Justine Picardie in 2011. In Daphne, among other storylines, the fictional du Maurier is researching a biography of Branwell Brontë, hoping to find evidence of his talent and the possibility that he may have contributed to his sisters’ famous novels. This book, The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë, published in 1960, is the result of that research.

Even without reading Justine Picardie’s novel, I would have known du Maurier was a fan of the Brontës as their influence is obvious in some of Daphne’s own novels, particularly Rebecca and Jamaica Inn. I can understand why she may have been fascinated by Branwell, whom she probably saw as a tragic and misunderstood figure. His story is certainly quite a sad one, though a lot of his problems were self-inflicted. As the only boy in a family of girls his father had high hopes for him (to the Victorians it was probably unthinkable that a brother would be outshone by three of his sisters, but with the Brontës that was exactly what happened) and du Maurier suggests that this put him under a lot of pressure to succeed.

As a child, Branwell, like Charlotte, Emily and Anne, was bright and imaginative. He and Charlotte worked together on a set of stories set in the imaginary world of Angria, while Anne and Emily created the fictional land of Gondal. His future seemed full of promise, but as he grew older everything he did seemed to end unhappily. Unlike his sisters he was not sent to school (possibly because his father thought he was too sensitive) and plans for him to study painting at the Royal Academy never came to anything. He tried repeatedly to have some of his poems accepted by Blackwood’s Magazine and was ignored every time; du Maurier tells us that he even wrote to William Wordsworth but didn’t receive a reply. After being dismissed from his job as a clerk at the railway station and then his next job as a tutor (where he possibly had an affair with his employer’s wife), he descended into alcohol and opium addictions and died in 1848 aged thirty-one.

This doesn’t feel like a particularly academic biography and I’m sure there will be more up to date information about Branwell that has come to light since 1960, so I can’t really comment on its accuracy. Du Maurier was a novelist first and foremost and I get the impression her main concern was to capture the essence of Branwell’s character and explore the reasons why he failed where his sisters succeeded and why all his hopes and dreams came to nothing. She also spends a lot of time discussing and analysing Branwell’s work. I was surprised that so many examples of his writing have survived – a lot of his poems are included in this book and some of his prose and letters.

Du Maurier clearly has a lot of sympathy for Branwell, which is not surprising as she has obviously set out to try to restore his reputation and help him gain the recognition he never had during his lifetime. I always think it helps when you can tell that a biographer is genuinely interested in the person he or she is writing about! However, even with du Maurier’s enthusiasm for her subject she never tries to claim that Branwell’s writing was something it wasn’t and she comes to the conclusion that although he did have some talent, his poems were nothing special. His biggest contribution to the literary world may have been the influence he had on the writing of his three sisters.

Daphne du Maurier is one of my favourite authors, but this is the first of her non-fiction books I have read. Since I also love all three Brontë sisters (Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are two of my favourite Victorian novels with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall not far behind) this seemed a good choice to begin with. I did find it interesting and the style of the writing is not too different from du Maurier’s novels. I’m not sure how much appeal it would have to people who don’t share my interest in both du Maurier and the Brontës, but for those of you who do want to know more about Branwell and the other Brontës, I definitely think it’s worth reading. I would also highly recommend Jude Morgan’s novel The Taste of Sorrow – it’s a fictional account of the Brontë family (including Branwell and the two older sisters who died as children) but it sticks very closely to the known facts.

The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins by William M. Clarke

January 10, 2014January 10, 201419 Comments

After reading The Frozen Deep recently, my interest in Wilkie Collins was reawakened and I decided it was time to read the biography I bought when I was in the middle of my Collins obsession a few years ago. There were not many to choose from at that time and this one sounded like the best available. I ordered a copy, but by the time it arrived I had moved on to other authors and didn’t feel like reading it anymore. Since then, one or two other biographies have been published which sound more appealing than this one, but it made sense to read the one I already own rather than buying a new one.

The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins was first published in 1988, although the edition I have was revised in 1996. The author, William M. Clarke, is married to Wilkie Collins’ great-granddaughter, Faith Elizabeth Dawson, and maybe because of this connection, the focus of the book is on Wilkie’s private life and relationships with his family and friends rather than on his work. Clarke does attempt to show us the circumstances surrounding the writing of most of Collins’ books, plays and stories and what may have inspired them, but he doesn’t often go into any detailed analysis of these.

After a brief introduction, the book follows Wilkie’s life in chronological order, beginning with his birth in January 1824. Wilkie was the eldest son of the Royal Academy landscape painter William Collins and his wife, Harriet Geddes, who was also from a family of artists. The first few chapters describe Wilkie’s early childhood, some of which was spent in France and Italy and the rest in London. I found this the least interesting section of the book, but it does show us some of the influences Wilkie was exposed to from an early age which would have had an impact on his future career (an appreciation of Italian art, for example, and familiarity with all the writers, poets and authors who were part of his father’s social circle including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Constable). I also enjoyed reading about Wilkie’s school days and how one of the older boys bullied Wilkie into telling stories late at night!

Clarke then takes us through Collins’ adult life, including his friendship with Charles Dickens, his battle with rheumatic gout (an illness he suffered from for many years), his six-month reading tour of America, and his addiction to laudanum and his unsuccessful attempts to withdraw from it. I’ve mentioned that Clarke doesn’t spend much time discussing Wilkie’s writing, but I did find it interesting to read his thoughts on the effects of laudanum and how in the later stages of his career it may have affected Wilkie’s ability to write descriptions of visual landscapes and construct the intricate plots he was famous for.

There are also some accounts of Collins’ travels with Dickens and I enjoyed reading about these, especially their walking tour of the Lake District (which reminds me that I still haven’t read The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices). It seemed Dickens disapproved of his daughter, Kate, marrying Wilkie’s younger brother, Charles Collins, and this put a strain on their friendship in later years.

But it’s Wilkie’s romantic relationships that are given the most attention, which is understandable as this book is supposed to be about his ‘secret life’. Wilkie never married but was in long-term relationships with two different women, Caroline Graves and Martha Rudd. He lived openly with Caroline and Harriet, her daughter from a previous marriage, while having three children with Martha, whose household he established at a separate address. Each woman was aware of the other and their children even visited each other. I’m sure neither woman could have been very happy with the position they were in but it seems they were both prepared to accept it as this arrangement continued for more than twenty years! Caroline did leave him briefly to marry another man (Wilkie actually attended the wedding) but returned several years later. Collins does seem to have genuinely cared about both of his families but this sort of behaviour must have been scandalous by Victorian standards (and not very admirable by modern standards either) and led to his sister-in-law, Kate, describing him as “as bad as he could be, yet the gentlest and most kind-hearted of men”.

Wilkie’s life was fascinating to read about, but I can’t really say that I enjoyed this book as I found Clarke’s writing style quite dry and boring. This is a book I’ve been dipping into over the last few weeks and reading a few pages at a time rather than ever feeling a compulsion to sit down and read it from cover to cover. It has clearly been thoroughly researched with lots of quotes from Collins himself and from people close to him (references are provided), and there’s plenty of supplementary material – notes, photographs, family trees, bibliography and several appendices, including an analysis of Wilkie’s bank accounts (Clarke’s unique position as the husband of one of Wilkie’s descendants meant he could access this information) but I think I would have been more interested in a book with more balance between Collins’ private life and his writing.

I’m going to finish this post with a question: do you like reading biographies of your favourite authors or do you think knowing too much about an author’s personal life can affect your enjoyment of their work?

Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World by Alison Weir

November 26, 2013November 26, 20138 Comments

Elizabeth of York’s story is a fascinating one. As the eldest daughter of King Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville (the alternate spelling of Wydeville is used in this book), Elizabeth lived during one of the most turbulent periods of English history, the Wars of the Roses. She was the sister of the two young princes who it is believed may have been murdered in the Tower of London, she married the first Tudor king, Henry VII, who defeated her uncle Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth, and she was also mother to another king, Henry VIII. Despite all of this, Elizabeth is not usually given as much attention as other figures of the period. This new biography, Elizabeth of York: A Tudor Queen and Her World, explores Elizabeth’s life and her historical significance.

Alison Weir is an author of both historical fiction and non-fiction. Although I have read one of her novels, Innocent Traitor, this is the first of her biographies I’ve read and I was very impressed. The book is written in a style that I found engaging and easy to read but it’s also a very thorough, long and detailed account of Elizabeth’s life. An incredible amount of research must have gone into the writing of this book and it contains an absolute wealth of information…I read it on my Kindle and was constantly bookmarking interesting facts and passages.

As well as taking us, in chronological order, through Elizabeth’s entire life from her birth to her death and its aftermath, we are also given lots of details on the social history of the period and what life was like for people who lived during that time: what they ate and drank, the clothes they wore, and the way children were treated and expected to behave. There are lists of dishes served at banquets, descriptions of the duties of ladies-in-waiting and even an appendix giving a full description of every known portrait of Elizabeth. Sometimes there’s too much detail (I didn’t really feel the need to know the names of the nurses of each of Elizabeth’s younger sisters, for example, and the lists of her privy purse expenses and all the gifts she bought and received were a bit overwhelming) but it all helps to build up a full and vivid picture of Elizabeth’s world.

Less is known about Elizabeth than other Tudor figures, so there are times when the focus of the book switches to important political events, conspiracies and other things taking place in the wider world, rather than on Elizabeth herself. The only drawback here is that with so few primary sources remaining to give us information on Elizabeth’s life, Weir can only assume what Elizabeth may have thought or how she felt. This is not really the author’s fault but it would have been interesting to know Elizabeth’s true thoughts on some of these issues, such as the pretenders to the throne who appeared during Henry VII’s reign claiming to be Elizabeth’s lost brothers.

Much as I enjoyed this book, I did have a problem with the portrayal of Richard III. I was aware before I started reading that Alison Weir has a negative opinion of Richard and believes him guilty of all the crimes that he has been accused of, but I still thought there was too much speculation and personal bias in her discussions of him. In the absence of any real evidence, we are told that ‘maybe Elizabeth hated him’ and ‘maybe Cecily was furious with him’, for example. These are not really historical facts, are they? The opinions of other authors and historians who take a more sympathetic view of Richard are dismissed as ‘wishful theories evolved by revisionists’. Anyway, this is just a small criticism of what is otherwise a wonderfully entertaining and informative book. For anyone interested in learning more about this important but often forgotten Tudor queen and her world, I would highly recommend reading Elizabeth of York. It really is a fascinating period of history and Elizabeth deserves to be remembered!

I received a copy of this book for review via Netgalley.

Daphne du Maurier and her Sisters: The Hidden Lives of Piffy, Bird and Bing by Jane Dunn

April 16, 201318 Comments

I don’t read a lot of biographies but I was pleased to have the opportunity to read this one as Daphne du Maurier is one of my favourite authors. Jane Dunn has previously written a book on Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell and another about Elizabeth I’s relationship with Mary Queen of Scots, but this is the first time I’ve read any of her work.

Daphne du Maurier and Her Sisters, as the title suggests, tells the story of not just Daphne, but also her two sisters, Angela and Jeanne – or Piffy, Bird and Bing as they were nicknamed. Rather than looking at each of the sisters’ lives separately, Dunn blends their three stories together and shows us the different ways they reacted to the same experiences and the influence they had on each other both as people and as writers or artists.

The three girls were born into a family of celebrities at the turn of the 20th century. Their father, Gerald, was a famous actor and theatre manager and their mother, Muriel Beaumont, was also an actress, while their grandfather, George du Maurier, was a successful writer. Angela (Piffy), Daphne (Bing) and Jeanne (Bird) had a rich and privileged childhood, but not always a very happy one. With a mother who could often be very distant, it was the flamboyant, theatrical Gerald who was the biggest influence on his daughters’ lives – sometimes in a good way and sometimes bad. He was a popular, charismatic man but also a selfish and spoiled one who liked to be the centre of attention and Daphne, who was less outgoing than her sisters, soon grew to resent the non-stop parties and socialising.

As Daphne is by far the most famous of the du Maurier sisters, it’s natural that most people who pick up this book will do so because they want to learn more about Daphne’s life. Having read Justine Picardie’s novel, Daphne, I already knew some of the basic facts – her difficult marriage to the soldier, Tommy ‘Boy’ Browning; her obsession with Menabilly, the house in Cornwall that became the model for Manderley in Rebecca – but I was keen to find out more about the author whose books I love so much. As a fan of Daphne’s novels I was hoping there would be more information on her work, so I was slightly disappointed that Dunn devotes no more than one or two pages to most of her novels, although it was enough to show me how Daphne’s writing related to various aspects of her life and I can now see how autobiographical many of her books were, particularly The Parasites and I’ll Never Be Young Again.

Yet despite my interest in Daphne, of the three du Maurier sisters the one I found I really liked and sympathised with was Angela. Dunn portrays Angela as a passionate, romantic and naïve girl who was eager to please but often felt inadequate and inferior, aware that she was not as pretty as Daphne and not her parents’ favourite. After a failed acting career, Angela wrote several novels but again found herself overshadowed by the success of her younger sister. Whenever she was mistaken for Daphne and asked if she was the novelist she would reply “I’m only the sister” which even became the title of her autobiography. The youngest sister, Jeanne, is not given as much attention in this book as Daphne and Angela, though this is understandable as less is known about her. Daphne and Angela both left behind a legacy of written work which Dunn is able to quote from, but in Jeanne’s case there is less material to work with especially as her life-long partner, the poet Noël Welch, chose not to cooperate.

I was completely gripped by the first few chapters of this book. I loved reading about the du Mauriers’ early years and meeting these three creative, imaginative little girls who enjoyed re-enacting their favourite scenes from Peter Pan and creating their own games and fantasy worlds. The descriptions of life after World War I – the Jazz Age of the 1920s and the lifestyles of the ‘Bright Young Things’ – were also fascinating. But as the sisters grew older and Dunn began to focus on constant holidays to France and Italy, and an endless cycle of friendships and love affairs, I thought the book started to become more repetitive and less interesting.

While I didn’t find this book as enthralling as the first few chapters led me to expect, I did still enjoy getting to know Piffy, Bird and Bing and have been left wanting to read the remaining Daphne du Maurier novels I still haven’t read, as well as maybe trying to find one of Angela’s.

I received a copy of this book for review via Netgalley

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

April 5, 201221 Comments

I’ve only read one of Claire Tomalin’s other biographies (Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self) but having read that one, Charles Dickens: A Life was everything I was expecting: well researched, thorough and very readable. It took me a long time to finish it but that’s just because I was reading other books at the same time and is no reflection on how much I was enjoying it. Charles Dickens is an ideal subject for a biography as he had such an eventful life and career. One of the things I liked about Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys book was the way she attempted to give us a balanced view of Pepys, looking at both his good points and his bad points, and she does the same here with Dickens.

There are plenty of positive things about Dickens that we can take away from this biography: his incredible energy, his literary talent and the amount of hard work and effort he was prepared to put in to achieve his ambitions. But Tomalin also shows us Dickens’ flaws, particularly the insensitive and cruel way he treated his wife Catherine Hogarth and sometimes his children too. And of course, she discusses his affair with the actress Nelly Ternan (this is the subject of one of Tomalin’s other biographies, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, which I haven’t read).

It was interesting to read about the progress of Dickens’ career as a writer, and how he went from writing character sketches of the people around him to developing longer stories and eventually producing his famous novels. I enjoyed reading what Tomalin had to say about the Dickens novels that I’ve read – it seems that she admires most of his work though not all of it – but be aware that if you haven’t read all of his books she does include some spoilers. I can understand this, as many of the plot points and characters in Dickens’ novels give us insights into the mind of Dickens himself, and it would be hard to discuss the man without discussing his work. However, I’m sure there will be a lot of people like myself who will read this biography without having read Dickens’ complete works first, so I thought I should warn you that you might come across things you would prefer not to know!

Overall I was left with a negative impression of Dickens rather than a positive one. I can admire the motivation, ambition and talent of someone who worked his way up from a job in a boot blacking factory to become first a journalist and then one of the most famous and successful writers in the world. But the way he treated people in his personal life, as well as the high opinion he seemed to have of himself, makes it hard for me to like him.

I’m not sure how this book compares with other Dickens biographies as this is the only one I’ve ever read, but I enjoyed it, learned a lot from it and was left with a much better understanding of the complex person Dickens was. And as well as the huge amount of information this book contains about the life and work of Dickens himself, as someone who loves reading about the Victorian period in general I was fascinated by all the little details of 19th century life! The book also comes with plenty of additional material including maps, illustrations, a bibliography and a list of the important people in Dickens’ life.

Finally, this has nothing to do with this biography but I was surprised to find how much of Dickens’ life story was already familiar to me through reading novels like Drood and The Last Dickens. This shows that although historical fiction may not always be completely accurate it’s often a good way to absorb historical facts while being entertained at the same time!