It is easy to sum up Enid Blyton's place in children's literature. She was, and is, the most successful British children's book author ever to have written, quite probably the most successful children's author in the world. She wrote some six hundred books, and estimates of her annual sales twenty-five years after her death vary between four and eight million copies worldwide. More than four hundred editions are still in print in Britain, and about ten new editions appear every month. Her work has been translated into at least twenty-seven languages, and--along with Lenin, Agatha Christie, Simenon, and Chairman Mao--she is reputed to be among the top five most-translated authors. Her most famous creation, "Noddy," with more than seventy editions in print, gained a new life through a television series in 1992. Her most well-known series, The Famous Five, appeared in twenty-one volumes between 1942 and 1953 and had sold about...