Interview with Dr. Siobhán Morrissey
Rethinking Enid Blyton
I thank Dr Siobhán Morrissey, University of Galway, School of Education, for her participation in this interview on Enid Blyton, primary school reading, reading practices, AI, Irish Indigenous literature and for sharing her personal reading experiences.
Siobhán Morrissey specialises in studies on Enid Blyton and is busy preparing a monograph. Her other areas of research and teaching include Irish children’s literature, fairytales, and twentieth-century British children’s literature.
PART I
Enid Blyton: social, historical, and bibliographical context
What inspired you to research Enid Blyton?
When I was completing my Masters in Popular Literature, I wanted to focus on a popular children’s author, and to my mind, there was nobody who fit this category better than Enid Blyton! I was also inspired to research her work because Blyton was one of my favourite authors as a child and I loved the idea of revisiting my childhood reading through a critical, adult lens.
What aspects of Enid Blyton’s work did you find were important to discuss in your research?
Blyton is often dismissed as simply writing fantasy, escapist style stories, with very little engagement with the historical, social, or political context of her time. I wanted to research her books from a literary-historical perspective, examining how her work is connected to what was happening in Britain during the twentieth century.
Why was it important for you to focus on Blyton’s texts rather than solely on biographical aspects?
There have been many biographies written about Blyton, which have heavily influenced the type of academic analysis completed on her work. Researchers incorporate elements of Blyton’s life in their academic studies, such as her apparent perennial childlike nature, which is linked to her “undeveloped uterus”. I found this type of analysis extremely sexist, and the insistence that her popularity was due to her childlike nature undermined her work and skill as a writer. I wanted to demonstrate the depth of her work and contextualise her work within literary genres that she is often excluded from. This type of research reveals how closely her work engaged with the socio-political developments of twentieth-century Britain.
How much did the social impact on Blyton’s writing and production, and was her writing a product of her time?
Her writing was absolutely a product of her time: she was a “daughter of the Empire,” as David Rudd writes, which manifests in her fiction: many of her books reflect the imperial and colonial ideologies of nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain. For example, in books like The Secret Mountain, and the Adventure series, we see the English protagonists travel to Africa and Asia, where they encounter characters who benefit from the English protagonists’ arrival and intervention in their lives. She was also influenced by colonial attitudes towards race, as her books reflect a belief in the superiority of whiteness.
PART II
The Magic Faraway Tree
When I was a child, I loved Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree series. I had a very tattered, red, hardback copy of the book with a large chunk of pages missing from the middle. Despite the state of the book, I absolutely loved the story! The series begins with The Enchanted Wood, where the protagonists move to the countryside and there, learn about an enchanted forest, which they are warned not to enter. In the forest, the children find the Faraway Tree, which has fairly conventional fantasy characters living in it, such as fairies and pixies, but also a Saucepan Man and a washerwoman called ‘Dame Washalot’. Climbing to the top of tree allows the children to access different lands, like ‘The Land of Take What You Want’ and ‘The Land of Presents’. Even though the various lands were supposed to be the most exciting part of the story, what really stayed with me was the image of the Faraway Tree, with these magical beings living inside.
Siobhán growing up in Tipperary
When I was older, I started reading the Famous Five series, and even though I enjoyed the stories, the series never captured me in the same way as the fantasy Faraway Tree series. So many of Blyton’s stories are about finding magic in nature and in the mundane – like the magic chair in The Wishing Chair – so for child readers, she transforms the real world into something magical.
PART III
Literacy, AI, and Indigenous Irish Literature
What are new reading trends in primary schools, libraries, and bookshops?
Book Tok is a major new trend with children and young people, where people on TikTok share their current and favourite reads. Bookshops now feature #BookTok sections both online and in-store, acknowledging TikTok’s impact and adapting to how young readers discover books today.
With genres and forms of reading, verse novels have become hugely popular in the last few years, where a novel is written entirely in verse rather than prose. Authors like Sarah Crossan and Kwame Alexander have contributed to making this form of writing really popular for children and young adults.
What is Indigenous Irish literature’s status in Ireland?
There are so many talented Irish and Irish-based children’s authors and illustrators who publish excellent books in Ireland. Some of my favourite authors are Oliver Jeffers, Sheena Wilkinson (I’m currently reading her book First Term at Fernside, which would most certainly appeal to fans of Blyton’s St Clare’s and Malory Towers), Patricia Forde, Pádraig Kenny, and I’ve just finished reading a brilliant book by Méabh McDonnell called Into the Witchwood which incorporates the Irish language, Irish folklore, and warnings and stories about fairies, into a contemporary story (See https://obrien.ie/into-the-witchwood ). There are also publishing houses in Ireland, like Little Island and O’Brien Press, which specialise in publishing children’s and young adult novels and organisations like Children’s Books Ireland who do excellent work in promoting Irish children’s and young adult literature.
Unfortunately, however, the children’s literature market in Ireland tends to be dominated by UK and US authors, such as Jeff Kinney, and David Walliams, and twentieth-century authors like Roald Dahl and of course Enid Blyton. In Ireland, there is a strong nostalgic connection to authors like Dahl and Blyton, which has sustained their popularity for decades.
Do you think AI will impact childhood education in both positive and negative ways?
At third level, we can already see the major impacts of AI on education, where universities have returned to in-person exams rather than continuous assessment to ensure students are prevented from using GenAI. My concern with GenAI at third level is its impact on students’ critical thinking skills: students can now get Chat GPT, DeepSeek, or whichever other platform they use, to generate entire essays and responses to assignments, removing the need for individual critical thinking.
I do think it will also become a major issue with primary and secondary education, leading to a necessary re-thinking of assessment models and homework. However, it is perhaps less of a problem in primary and secondary education, where most of the learning happens in school. I can imagine that for teachers, like university lecturers, it may become very difficult to tell if a student’s homework was completed by themselves, or by using GenAI.
That said, a positive to GenAI is its ability to assist students with their schoolwork: if a student is struggling with a particular subject, and there isn’t the needed support or assistance from an adult at home, GenAI could be used as a helpful educational tool.
Interviewed by Dr Claudia Zucca, Literature Team member, Museum of Childhood Ireland and Professor in Primary Education, University of Cagliari.