Who grew up reading Enid Blyton books?

[OldFred]

Just seen that The Magic Faraway Tree movie is to be released in the UK on 27 March 2026 🙂

I will hold judgement until I've seen it on it compares to the books but as a child, I devoured EB books.
I loved them all but TMFT holds a special place in my heart so fingers crossed!

I know EB books rightly so have had their fair share of criticism but (immigrant) childhood me just took them at face value, and as an adult and parent, my enduring love for them remains.
The Mini Old Freds have inherited all my copies and love them too.

What are your favourite EB books?
(Hoping to come across some I've not heard of!)

Yes! That was one of the times when Goon also turned up in disguise - but, unlike Fatty, he was truly useless and unconvincing at it!

Fatty was a bit manipulative, though, when he staged his coup to take over the leadership of TFFO from Larry.

I mean, he was always obviously the natural leader, but it was still a bit bad-eggish how he went about securing it officially!

My dad said they were banal and morally simplistic 😂.

They were 25p, so I’d save my 5p pocket money every week, and buy one every 5th week- he couldn’t stop me doing that!

Oh i had so many!
Faraway tree
Wishing chair
Famous five
Secret seven
And im sure there were more!
I also had a copy of the 3 golliwogs but even as a child I found the names rather 😳

Oh and edit to add Mallory Towers, I loved those aswell 🥰

But again, Larry is a totally flat character who is just there as filler. He doesn’t have any identifiable characteristics, and was just written to be set aside once the group came in contact with Fatty. Bets is young and dumb, Fatty is clever, rich and a master of disguise, but Pip, Larry and Daisy are just names.

Read all the St.clares and Famous 5 etc, begged my mother to go to boarding school.

Indeed, the PC brigade wildly missing the point!

That doesn't surprise me cause HBCs performance was utterly mesmerizing. I know there were other dramas in the same series but Enid's is the only one I remember. I might have to seek it out online later and watch it again.

@NormasArse I love that you were a rebel over Enid Blyton of all people 😂.

Just spent a good half hour reading through all your comments and it's great to see how many of us credit our love of reading to EB books!
Made me laugh at how we now, as adults can see through the characterisation of certain characters, especially in the boarding school stories.
Also love just how much language has evolved, and I've been compiling a list of words or phrases in my head that we don't really come across any more!
A few that come immediately to mind -
Describing someone as a scatterbrain or a featherbrain, or as sour milk!
Calling someone a sneak, a prude, a good/bad egg, or a snob.
And not forgetting the oft used title of 'The Honourable...' 😁

I loved and still love Enid Blyton. The school books, Secret Seven, Famous Five, Find outers, The secret Series, The Advevture Series, The R Mystery series, I loved them all.

Started with Noddy at about age 4, & read through the lot!
I still love a good teen type book - the Gone series was amazing, & Chronicles of Ancient Darkness even better..

SDTGisAnEvilWolefGenius · 21/11/2025 14:24
I wasn’t allowed to read Enid Blyton books - my mum forbade it because she didn’t think they were well written.

My DH wasn’t allowed to read them as a child which always struck me as odd as both his parents used to bang on about the iniquities of censorship.
If my parents had banned them I’d have found them irresistible forbidden fruit.
Maybe Bluebeard could be rewritten so as to be less gruesome and his locked room full of Enid Blyton books as opposed to murdered wives.

While I would probably opt to leave the books mostly unchanged, but print them with an introduction dealing with the dated language, stereotyping, offensive attitudes etc, I don’t think it’s in the least unreasonable to think about the experience of a black child reader encountering as the only black characters Mafumu the cheerful African child who worships Jack and is continually decorating him with flowers, Jojo the violent, stupid servant, and the paratrooper who talks about himself in the third person as ‘poor n***’.

There’s only one Honourable I can think of— ghastly Angela, whom the O’Sullivan twins silly cousin Alison adores. Or is Clarissa in Malory Towers an Honourable too?

I read them all in the 80's, many copies were my mothers which she had read in the 50's and 60's when she was a child. I loved them especially the famous five and the Malory Towers books, I just adored them. Similar to a previous poster I think a lot of 21st Century kids find them just too old fashioned and unrelatable, only my youngest seems to enjoy them the way I did. It's funny though because as a kid I was quite happy reading much older books such as Little Women or The Secret Garden or Five Children and It. I suppose as a previous poster says the world must be just too different now and many children find it too unrelatable, my two eldest didn't like my favourite fuzzy felt Moomins show either and said Wonka was a lot better then the Gene Wilder Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it's only the youngest who revels in "old" things.

Magic faraway tree, the wishing chair, naughty Amelia Jane, Noddy, famous five, secret seven, Mallory towers, St. Clares, I honestly think I have read all of her books. She had many stand alone too. I read many to my sons too. I collect certain ones, plus I have many first editions. She was a gifted writer, I feel Jacqueline Wilson is an up to date version in some ways.

I liked Mr Pinkwhistle!

You've read all 2164 books! How did you get hold of some of the early ones? I've never seen any for sale even at an unreasonable price.

I decided not to include EB in my list of book collections as she wrote far too many. I do occasionally find a special one which I do buy though.

It's weird to think of just how extremely long it would take to read all of EB's books... and then to stop and think that she found time to write them all!

Just on a typewriter too - no computers with editing facilities.

I believe she did little editing, typed it out, and only did minor changes. I met someone who worked for her publisher. She said EB used to refer to herself as "Mary Mouse" when she phoned to speak (normally to the boss).

I'm told she was a 2 finger typist, and a Famous Five book (about 40k words) took her about 4-5 days to type.
Assuming all books took around 5 days and she wrote continuously it would have taken around 28 years to write them all.

However some of the books are collections of short stories (she wrote over 8000 short stories) and some of those are used in more than one book.

Love the find outers but it always annoyed me how flat the characters of Larry and Daisy were. They are literally just filler. We don’t know anything about them - some of the scenes are set in Pip and Bets’ house and we know that their parents are very strict and we do see something of their personalities. But there’s nothing about Larry and Daisy. It’s quite disappointing.

Maybe they're like the people on here who earn 'high six figures' and say that they feel they should pay a lot more tax to reflect their privilege!!

Then again, it was a private boarding school, wasn't it - so whilst some children would come from wealthier homes than others, there were probably not many whom most people would objectively class as 'poor'.

Thanks - very interesting to learn.

Mind, I wonder if she was a two-finger typist because she had limited typing skills or because she was having to think what to type as she went along?!

I think that the whole point of the Five Find-Outers is the plots and mystery-solving, though — she’s not that interested in anyone’s character. Everyone stays exactly as in the first book, whether that’s Naive But Sometimes Observant Youngest, Master of Disguise or Comic Policeman.

I mean, she can handle a big cast of characters and make everyone change and develop (she does it really well in Six Cousins at Mistletoe Farm), but it seems to me that the Five Find-Outers is rather like the Secret Seven, aimed at slightly younger readers than Mistletoe Farm or even the Famous Five or the ‘Adventure’ series?

I tell you what always bothers me in the Five Find-Outers books, though, although Blyton is just reflecting the class system of her time. It’s the way Ern, Mr Goon’s nice nephew, who is a recurring character and pretty much an honorary Find-Outer, is treated. He’s working-class, so there’s no question of him eating with the rest of the children in the nursery or dining room of whoever’s house they’re having tea at. He invariably eats in the kitchen with the cook and housemaid. There’s no discussion. It’s just assumed.