Just to recap. I can imagine Wishing Chair or Secret Island being written chapter at a time. And I can imagine them being written all at once over a few days. We're patiently trying to sift through the evidence to find out how these books WERE written!
Anita says something very interesting in her "Enid the Writer' piece elsewhere on the EBS site, so I'll paste that in here:
In Chapter 14 of The Story of My Life (1952) Enid Blyton takes us through the process of writing a book, giving The Enchanted Wood (1939) as an example. This is an odd choice, since several key elements of The Enchanted Wood (which, incidentally, was written thirteen years before The Story of My Life) had been used previously in earlier works. These elements may have suddenly sprung into her mind as she worked on The Enchanted Wood, but they were certainly not new creations. Enid ignores that, presenting some of these things as having popped into her head completely out of the blue as she wrote the book, and declaring that she was as surprised by them as anyone.
She tells us that she began with the characters of Jo, Bessie and Fanny. Then she followed a winding path through a wood in her imagination, and suddenly saw "the strange Faraway Tree, a tree that touches the sky, and is the home of little folk. I had never heard of it, or seen it till that moment—but there it is, complete in every detail." In reality, Enid Blyton had already been acquainted with the Faraway Tree for about three years before writing The Enchanted Wood, as she had first written about the tree in The Yellow Fairy Book (1936.)
Enid Blyton goes on to describe climbing the tree in her imagination and seeing a door at the top: "... before I can knock, it is opened, and there stands a round, red-faced, twinkling-eyed little fellow, beaming at me. I know who it is, though I have never in my life seen him before. It is Moonface, of course." Once again, further investigation reveals that Enid Blyton had created Moonface previously. He too had appeared in The Yellow Fairy Book, complete with little round room and slippery-slip.
Enid then writes: "I can hear a strange noise—a jingling-jangling, clinking-clanking noise. What is it? Ah, yes, you know, because you have read the book. But at that moment the story hasn't even been written yet, so I don't know. I have to look and see what makes the noise." It is the Saucepan Man, hung with clanking pots and pans, but then Enid Blyton ought to have known that since she had dreamt up the character of the Saucepan Man thirteen years earlier, when writing The Enid Blyton Book of Brownies (1926.)
She describes following Moonface and the Saucepan Man up the topmost branch of the Faraway Tree to discover that "A little yellow ladder stretches surprisingly from the last branch, up through a purple hole in the cloud that lies on the top of the tree." "Surprisingly" may not be quite the right word, as the ladder and cloud also featured in The Yellow Fairy Book.
So, it appears that in The Story of My Life Enid Blyton is giving us a somewhat fictionalised account of the writing of The Enchanted Wood, making things neater and simpler than they really were. Some valuable insights into her creativity may still be gleaned from her account, but it does not portray the whole truth of what was obviously a rather more complex process.
This stresses a difficulty of this exercise. We may not always be able to take at face value something Enid writes in an Old Thatch letter to children, for example.
Still, it's fascinating to see what Enid wrote in her Old Thatch letters towards the end of Secret Island (thanks very much for transcribing them, Aussie Sue). Though they don't tell us whether Enid had already written the book or was still writing the 'stories', they do imply that she didn't yet have a publishing deal. Even after
Adventures of Wishing Chair had been published in time for Xmas 1937 and Enid had been madly plugging the availablity of the book in her
Sunny Stories letter. (God, she had to do so much herself!)
It was Basil Blackwell who published The Secret Island in the end. The book came out in September 1938. And I've just seen in Enid's diary for Thursday 2 June, 1938:
Did page in a.m. Did all flowers. Hugh home with temp at 3. Put him to bed. Mr and Mrs Basil Blackwell came to tea. Stayed til quarter to six. Dr Henry came and Hugh is in for bronchitis again. G. in bed with temperature. Hugh's temp 101-2.
Reading that, I feel like giving Enid some advice. "Carry on, Superwoman."
Flicking forward through Seven Stories transcript of 'notable and sample diary entries' I see that her entry for 29 February, 1940 reads:
Worked till tea. Had children. Corrected proofs and read till bed. Pitapat began having kittens. Sunny Stories has jumped to 59,000!
Well, with
Sunny Stories selling that amount of copies per week, and Enid allowed to plug her books in her Old Thatch letter, it would be a proper idiot of a publisher who didn't realise that Enid Blyton was the goose that was not just laying golden eggs but bringing them nicely to term!
Yesterday, I asked Seven Stories (as opposed to Sunny Stories!) whether there was a full transcription of the diary entries for 1937, 1938 and 1939. There isn't. And it's only when that's done, and all the Old Thatch letters for these years are available, that we'll have all the evidence for whether Secret Island, Galliano's Circus, Secret of Spiggy Holes, Enchanted Wood and Hurrah for the Circus were first written as little gems or as bumper bundles of brilliance.
Looking forward to reading your further thoughts, Sue. And of course yours, Rob and Anita. And everyone else's. This is authentic research by a team of Enid aficionados, eighty years on from the historical period that we're considering!