By Elodie Barnes | On December 31, 2023 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (0)
Enid Blyton (1897 – 1968) is one of the world’s most successful and prolific children’s authors. She wrote some seven hundred full-length books, many of which have never been out of print. Here is a selection of Blyton’s top 5 series.
Despite controversy over the literary merit of some of her work, including the use of outdated and offensive language, she remains one of the world’s most popular fiction authors, coming sixth in an all-time bestselling list by estimated sales (behind William Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, Danielle Steel, Harold Robbins, and Dr. Seuss, and well ahead of J.K. Rowling at number 10).
Her books were intended for children between the ages of about three and twelve, and many were part of a series — one of the most popular being “The Famous Five.” Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On November 22, 2023 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (0)
Elspeth Barker (November 16, 1940 – April 21, 2022) was a Scottish novelist and journalist. Her only novel, O Caledonia, published in 1991 and reissued in 2021, has been hailed as a classic of modern Scottish literature.
Darkly humorous, skillful, lyrical, and somewhat autobiographical, it tells the story of the life and death of a young girl named Janet. It won several awards on its first publication and remained Elspeth Barker’s only published work of fiction. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On October 24, 2023 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (0)
Enid Blyton (August 11, 1897 – November 28, 1968) was a prolific British writer of children’s stories. Her most famous books include The Famous Five and Secret Seven series, The Faraway Tree, and the Noddy books.
It is estimated that she wrote some seven hundred books, along with hundreds of short stories, magazine articles, and poems.
Blyton’s work is controversial for its sometimes dated and offensive views, yet decades after her death she remains one of the most popular children’s authors in the world. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On October 1, 2023 | Updated March 15, 2025 | Comments (0)
Nina Bawden (January 19, 1925 – August 22, 2012) was a British novelist, children’s book writer, and campaigner. Best known for the children’s novel Carrie’s War, she published twenty-three adult novels and twenty children’s books over some fifty years.
In all of her writing, she made “use of all of my life, all memory, wasting nothing,” and claimed that if her books were read in sequence, they formed a “coded autobiography.”
She was also a fierce campaigner for rail safety after being involved in the Potters Bar train crash of 2002. Read More→
By Elodie Barnes | On July 22, 2023 | Updated April 9, 2025 | Comments (9)
Sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell collaborated artistically, influenced each other’s work, shared friends, and were central figures in the Bloomsbury Group. They were also at the heart of one another’s family stories.
Their relationship was a deep and unusual one: powerful, interdependent, with unsettling periods of jealousy and hostility, yet characterized by mutual support and devotion throughout their lives. Virginia was one of the most influential English authors of the twentieth century; Vanessa was a noted painter.
The sisters lived close to one another until Virginia’s death in 1941. Infusing both her writing and her life, it was the relationship that influenced Virginia more than any other except that with her husband, Leonard Woolf. Read More→
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