(no subject)

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

Firstly I've got to say how much I'm enjoying Biskybat's fanfic. Enid Blyton is undergoing such a revival at the moment:in the library with my daughter this afternoon she chose a Malory Towers book. I was a bit doubtful as I never liked Enid Blyton, but she wanted it because her friends are all reading them. The shelves were groaning with reissued Blytons with revamped covers. This brings me onto my point - would Antonia Forest be more widely read and in print today, if she had kept her stories in the same time period throughout? (I mean the post-war 40s) Would modern teachers/librarians/children cope with the aspects of Marlow world that they dislike if those aspects could be accepted as part of the period? Plenty of children's classics survive featuring privileged middle class kids with nannys and cooks etc. and the survival of Malory Towers etc. shows that boarding school stories are not a problem. But is the Marlowverse just too much of a problem transposed into the seventies?

Comments

[biskybat.livejournal.com]

It occurred to me that EB has actually become a classical author! - the part that stands the test of time rather than the quality bit.

Children continue to cling to EB in the teeth of varying parental disapproval (and this disapproval stretches back into my own childhood when EB was still writing; she was being banned from libraries even then) because she produces highly imaginative escapist worlds without adults, is undemanding and provides happy endings.

AF wrote for intelligent, thinking children and I think part of the reason for her relative unpopularity is that such children may not be drawn to school or holiday story books and therefore never find her. I appreciate her far more as an adult than I ever did as a child.

And glad you like the fanfic, jackmerlin!

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

And intelligent, thinking children are probably a relative minority anyway.

[biskybat.livejournal.com]

Yes, I can't see Nicola Marlow or Miranda having much time for AF's school stories because the subject matter wouldn't interest them although they would probably have liked the historical ones.

[jackmerlin.livejournal.com]

How true. I would never have found AF myself, not being into school stories if my genius god mother (who was a childrens' librarian) hadn't given me Autumn Term for a birthday present.