Notes from a small island

At the time, Blyton’s books were just starting to become widely available in India, though Ram Advani recalls having seen stray copies in the 1940s and 1950s. (“I stocked these books,” Advani says, “because there was a demand, and it was taken for granted that a store like mine, which kept only books in the English language, would have the whole lot of the Enid Blyton series on hand. I confess I never read them.”)

British children had been devouring Blyton’s work since the early 1920s. A poll recently conducted by one of the United Kingdom’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Costa Book Awards, identified Blyton – who produced more than 700 books and 5,000 short stories during her 45-year career – as Britain’s most beloved writer of all time, ranking her above Jane Austen (fourth), William Shakespeare (fifth), and Charles Dickens (sixth).