Passing it on: Enid Blyton and Antonia White

This is another article about people who suffered at the hands of their parents then went on to make their own children suffer in much the same way.

Writers Enid Blyton and Antonia White are two more people who passed on their bad experiences to their children.

Apart from writing fiction, having two daughters and causing a lot of suffering for many of the people around them, Enid Blyton and Antonia White have little in common. 

There are a few references on here to Antonia White’s life and her autobiographical fiction with more to come, but there is little in Enid Blyton’s life and books that is relevant to this blog so this is almost certainly her first and last appearance. 

Enid Blyton’s books
Enid Blyton was one of the most popular and successful children’s writers ever. I never cared much for her books myself, but millions of other children did: she was one of the most borrowed authors in the public libraries. I remember being informed when I first joined that her books were too popular to be reserved - as if I cared!

Enid Blyton and her family
I read some biographical material that revealed the dark side of Enid Blyton a while back and have summarised from memory an example of her passing it on.

Enid Blyton’s parents frequently had violent quarrels. She had first-hand experience of the devastating effect this can have on sensitive and impressionable young children. Her idolised father left the family when she was 12 years old. She had only occasional contact with him after that, and he died when she was 23.

She seems to have been permanently affected by his desertion and death.

As often happens, rather than take extra special care to ensure that her children never had to go through what she had been through she just passed it all on.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Angel: witches and writers

Elizabeth Taylor’s novel Angel has inspired two previous articles:

Angel’s Imagination covers the ways in which a very strong, active imagination can be a liability in everyday life.

Angel’s Life and Personality describes Angel and her life mainly in modern-day, this-world terms.

Much of Angel is familiar not only because I have read the biographies of Ouida and Marie Corelli that were the source of some of the material in Elizabeth Taylor’s novel, but also because it reminds me of what I have read, and sometimes written, about other people of interest.

Angel Deverell has many characteristics and events in her life in common with both fictional witches and real-life creative writers.

Angel and some fictional witches

I had read only a few pages of the book when Diana Wynne Jones’s young witch Gwendolen Chant came to mind. They have selfishness, an abrupt manner and single-mindedness in common. Gwendolen wants to rule the world; Angel wants to dominate the world.

There is a scene in Angel where she visits her publisher at his home; she ignores his wife. This reminds me of something I quoted about C. S. Lewis’s witch Jadis in the article about Gwendolen Chant: 

“In Charn she [Jadis] had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical." 
From The Magician’s Nephew

Both Gwendolen and Angel are quick to take offence and become furious when thwarted. Both hate to see others in possession of things they want for themselves. Both are outraged when they don’t get the recognition they think they deserve.

Neither girl is interested in academic achievement; they just concentrate on their one obsession to the exclusion of everything else, with Angel exercising her imagination and Gwendolen her magical powers.