Faraway Tree Books in Order

Enid Blyton was born Enid Mary Blyton in East Dulwich, South London, on August 11, 1897. She spent most of her childhood in Beckenham, Kent, with her two younger brothers, Hanly and Carey. Her father was a clothing wholesaler, and she was close to him, especially over books, music, and the outdoors.

At school, Blyton was bright, sporty, and popular. She was Head Girl in her final years, and she was already finding ways to make stories part of daily life. With two friends, she produced a little magazine called Dab, filling it with short fiction and ideas of her own.

Writing was there early, but teaching came first. In 1916, Blyton turned down a place at music school and trained as a teacher instead. She taught at a boys' preparatory school in Kent, then worked as a governess for four brothers in Surrey, experiences that gave her a close view of the games, worries, and small dramas of childhood.

Her first published book, the poetry collection Child Whispers, arrived in 1922. During the 1920s she also wrote educational books and contributed regularly to Teachers World, building a practical writing career one article at a time.

She worked at an astonishing pace.

After marrying editor Hugh Pollock in 1924, Blyton began using a typewriter, a change that made her already rapid output even faster. She wrote and edited the magazine that became Sunny Stories, while producing books for young readers. Her early longer fiction included The Secret Island, published in 1938.

The next two decades brought many of the books readers still meet first: the Famous Five, Secret Seven, Malory Towers, Noddy, and the Faraway Tree stories. In The Enchanted Wood, children find a giant tree full of odd neighbours and changing worlds. In the Famous Five, friends spend school holidays hunting for clues. At Malory Towers, school life becomes a place for friendships, rows, jokes, and growing up.

The countryside kept turning up on the page.

Blyton lived in Buckinghamshire for many years, where her daughters Gillian and Imogen were born. After her divorce from Pollock, she married surgeon Kenneth Waters in 1943. Later, the couple bought Manor Farm in Dorset, and its fields, gardens, and rural surroundings fed into the kind of outdoor settings that appear again and again in her work.

Her books often put children in charge of the action. They explore woods, islands, schools, secret passages, and imaginary lands, usually with food packed for the day and a problem that needs sorting out. The stories move quickly, but they also make room for loyalty, fairness, courage, and the pleasure of a trusted group of friends.

Across her career, Blyton wrote around 700 books, roughly 2,000 short stories, poems, and a huge number of magazine pieces. She died in 1968, but her characters, from Moonface to the Famous Five, have kept finding new readers and new editions.