School Stories

27.05.2010

One of the literary world’s greatest authors, Mary Pollock, spent over 30 years of her life writing a collection of stories with a total daily word count at 10,000 words, the length of a typical undergraduate thesis. Born in 1897 into a wealthy family from London, Mary was the eldest of three children, and as such, received the highest levels of education in a prep school in London and later at university. She became head girl and excelled at everything she put her hand to, particularly sports, music and writing. She trained to be a teacher after graduation and spent five years teaching in private schools before she got married, at which point she focussed on developing her writing career.

In her career, she wrote over 800 books and several short stories for magazines, of which over 750 titles were published. In her forty-five year career, she became one of the most successful children’s writers of all time and is currently the 5th most translated author in the world, after Walt Disney, Agatha Christie, Jules Verne and William Shakespeare. Over 600 million copies of her books have been sold and almost every bookstore in the world stocks her titles. Her books have been translated into nearly 90 languages. Nowadays, she is most commonly known by her pseudonym, Enid Blyton.

Her books can be generally divided into three categories - ordinary children having extraordinary adventures, like in the Famous Five, fantastical tales, including Noddy, and boarding school adventures, such as Malory Towers. Much of her history, background and personal values are conveyed in her stories, for example, her take on blacks is evident in her Golliwog series. This is especially true in her series Malory Towers. Having been divorced in 1939 for reasons unclear, she married the surgeon Kenneth Darrell Waters, whose name was subsequently selected for the heroine of this boarding school series.

This series of six books is based partly on the her prep school, adventures and experiences, and also on the Scottish boarding school, St. Leonard’s near St. Andrews, Scotland, which a few members of her close family attended. Written over a period of six years in the post-WWII era, these books appear very similar to other boarding school books Blyton penned. Most of her boarding school books are wholesome, light-hearted, culturally revealing narratives of life in the early 20th Century. Schools are divided by gender, with only the wealthiest women attending the prestigious all girls schools. Each series contains details relating to lacrosse matches, the experience of boarding in large dormitories and an element of class inequality, racism and promotion of social segregation. Closer reading of Malory Towers reveals a striking similarity with Blyton’s own background, with books containing her most poignant teenage memories and an exploration of the ‘what if’s of some of the experiences that Blyton avoided.

Written for children in the 1940s, each boarding school book has 200 pages which are subdivided into twenty chapters of ten pages each. Each also has a mystery to solve, a life lesson to learn and a moral message in its resolution. This makes the book extremely easy for any aged reader to digest, although they are less engaging for more mature readers as the stories contained are so brief, straightforward, slightly patronising and out of touch with a modern society. A good read for situations where your attention must be elsewhere or an excellent present for a younger relative, this is an author to consider.