Thanks for this reply, @AliasGrace47. You've made me think!
I've reassessed my minimisation of Blyton. One of her children claimed she was abusive, the other said she wasn't. However, I'm well-versed in the golden child vs. scapegoat dynamic. I think it can be accepted that she was - and denying her children any contact with their father because she'd got tired of him and moved on is really unforgivable. And when married to her first husband at least, she allegedly had a number of affairs with both men and women. (Her portrayal of Alison's schoolgirl crush on Miss Quentin in the St. Clare school series was one of the few nuanced, sensitively drawn characterisations in the whole of her output, it seems to me).
Woolf's anti-semitism was public. She'd published fiction containing such problematic racist tropes that one publisher had to get her to revise it. The story 'The Duchess and the Jeweller' includes the well-known and horrible stereotypes of big noses and monetary greed. Another Jewish protagonist is described thus - 'her food, of course, swam in oil and was nasty'. Woolf was also famously waspish and openly nasty to her female contemporaries in particular, most notably May Sinclair and Katherine Mansfield, whom she viciously satirised as Mrs Manresa in Between the Acts and referred to as stinking like 'a civet cat that had taken to streetwalking'. Ofc, private comments in a diary never intended for publication are another thing - and Leonard published these against her stated wishes in her Will. There's a lot of fragility in Woolf's personality and genius, and this is nuanced as there were plenty of good things about her as well. And I'll always read her, because in my biased view she really is up there amongst the most outstanding writers of all time.
E M Forster: I think his sexism (mild, I agree) often derives from the fact that he's famously bad at writing heterosexual relations. Henry Willcox's proposal to Margaret Schlegal, for eg., must be one of the most awkward and unromantic in English literature. There are problematic caricatures of Indian characters in A Passage to India, albeit he does try to represent the Raj from both eastern and western perspectives. I think, on reflection, Joseph Conrad might have been a better example. Burnett, however, is more overt in The Secret Garden. The taint of colonialism - more than parental neglect - must be responsible for turning Mistress Mary into such a brat, and of course nothing more medicinal than a good dose of Yorkshire fresh air is enough to sort her out and instil in her some good, old-fashioned British common sense! It jars.
Wyndham Lewis, T S Eliot, unashamed fascists. D H Lawrence by all accounts a very nasty piece of work - wrote about herding specific groups of people (can't remember whether these were race- or class-based) into Kew Gardens and pumping it full of poison gas. This assertion predated the Holocaust. He once wrote to Katherine Mansfield that she revolted him, stewing in her consumption, and he hoped she would die. Nice!
Charles Dickens has long been known to have been hateful to his wife. I believe evidence has recently come to light that he tried to have her shut away in a mental asylum.
As for Carroll and Ransome - some highly dubious behaviour between grown men and children in both men's biographical stories, in particular the former. Carroll's Alice books are wonderful literature, but I now can't read these without feeling slightly contaminated.
Again, thanks for the food for thought!