Back to two posts a week for a while I think, now that the locked down library displays are done.
Malory Towers on TV Episodes 11 & 12
and
Cunningham and Petrov: The Mystery of the Missing Agent chapter 3
For all those children, and a few adults too, who find an escape into a safer and more attractive world in a book by Enid Blyton, it may come as a surprise that for the author herself the stories were also an escape. Her best writing was done at the most difficult times of her life. Much later on, when she achieved a mature happiness in her second marriage, some of the freshness went and the repetitive nature of the long adventure, mystery and school stories, of which her critics have complained, reflected the fact that her need to escape into the safe world of the child had almost gone.
A very interesting theory from Imogen Smallwood, Enid’s younger daughter, who sadly died in February this year.