a childlike approach to life

I was writing about Enid Blyton for my U-Penn's Statement of Purpose yesterday, and this morning I found a short article about her in the newspaper (I'm still on medical-leave today, so I had the time to read newspaper. Hahahahahaha).

I used to collect many of her books since I was a child... but I gave them away when I was in university, for a charity event sort of thing... *sad* I love my books so much... but the event was held for donating books to the needy children... so, don't be so stingy, ok! ^________^

TODAY, 11 November 2008

ENID BLYTON

She was eternally 13

English author behaved like a 'spiteful teenager'

Enid Blyton had the emotional age of a 13-year-old because fierce arguments between her parents "froze" her development, according to her only surviving daughter.

The creator of the Famous Five and the Secret Seven had a "child-like" approach to life and frequently behaved like a "spiteful" teenager even after becoming a mother, Imogen Smallwood said.

Blyton was recently voted Britain's best-loved author and prided herself on writing about the "jolly things in life". But since her death in 1968, a picture of a cold, occasionaly malevolent figure has emerged.

Mrs Smallwood, 73, said that witnessing a particularly upsetting argument between her mother and drunken father, shortly after which he moved in with another woman, could have contributed to Blyton's troubled personality.

"Barbara Stoney, [Blyton's 1974 biographer], suggested that trauma she suffered around her 13th birthday was so huge that a lot of her emotional development just froze and I think this is a very good way of looking at her," Mrs Smallwood told the BBC in a new Radio 4 documentary, A Fine Defence of Enid Blyton.

"I think her approach to life was quite childlike and she could also sometimes be almost spiteful like a teenager," she added.

Blyton's brother Hanly has previously described the distressing impact of the fights, saying: "Enid and I used to stop at the top of the stairs with our arms around each other, crying and listening to all that was going on."

The traumas of Blyton's teenage years also took their toll on her physical development, according to the Stoney biography, which detailed how she was given hormone injections to help her conceive after a gynaecologist described her underdeveloped uterus as "like that of a 12 or 13-year-old girl".

Blyton went on to have two more children: Gillian in 1931 and Imogen in 1935. Her books have sold more than 500 million copies across the world.

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

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