Enid Blyton

Enid Blyton (1897 to 1968) was an English children's author, born in East Dulwich, London, whose Famous Five, Secret Seven, Malory Towers, Faraway Tree and Noddy books have sold more than 600 million copies in some ninety languages.

She trained as a teacher, taught at Bickley Park School and from 1920 worked as a nursery governess. Her first book, Child Whispers (1922), was a slim collection of poems. The Faraway Tree series opened with The Enchanted Wood in 1939 and ran to four books by 1951. Five on a Treasure Island, illustrated by Eileen Soper, was published by Hodder & Stoughton on 11 September 1942 and began the Famous Five, which reached 21 books with Five Are Together Again in 1963. The six Malory Towers school stories appeared from 1946 to 1951, starting with First Term at Malory Towers. The Secret Seven began in 1949 with Brockhampton Press, illustrated by George Brook, and ran to 15 books by 1963. Noddy first appeared in the Sunday Graphic in 1949, with Noddy Goes to Toyland published that November. At her peak in the early 1950s she often published more than fifty books a year. She died in London on 28 November 1968.

For collectors

Early Hodder & Stoughton printings of the Famous Five with Eileen Soper's illustrations, beginning with Five on a Treasure Island (1942), and the Brockhampton Press Secret Seven books from 1949 are the books most associated with her best-known series. Many later reprints revised her texts and renamed characters, as with the Faraway Tree books, which makes unrevised early editions distinct from modern ones.