The character assassination of writer Alison Uttley: Part 1

Feuding authors? Alison Uttley vs Enid Blyton

This post is a closer look at what happened to the reputation of writer Alison Uttley. While the other writers I discussed previously – Laura Ingalls Wilder and Judith Kerr – both obtained iconic status for their fictions, Uttley’s life and reputation have gone into free fall since the publication of her diaries and authorised biography. Her books are mainly out of print, and the consensus of critics seems to be she was a nasty piece of work.

Has her reputation been unfairly trashed? This post will try and unpick what happened.

A few years ago, I happened to pick up a copy of Alison Uttley’s Diaries in a library sale. I almost didn’t. I’m not a big reader of diaries and although I read Alison Uttley’s books growing up – the Little Grey Rabbit stories, The Country Child and A Traveller in Time (I especially loved the BBC series of this Tudor timeslip) she wasn’t a writer I treasured. But once I started the diaries, I was absorbed. There was something mesmerising in Uttley’s vitality and her intense passion for such things as diverse as a flight of birds, a flower in her garden, cricket, a broadcast on the radio, a new novel, all of it mixed in with the mundane details of her domestic life, and the day-to-day struggle to overcome personal tragedy and professional setbacks.

Uttley was an astonishing person. Her diaries start soon after the death of her husband from suicide in 1930. In the early entries she is struggling to recover from that blow, and to pay the bills – which she is determined to do by writing, rather than the more conventional route of lodgers or handouts from in-laws. (Her choice reflects that of the fictional Miss Buncle, discussed here.) She had already shown her unconventional grit when she went from the small hill farm in Derbyshire, where she was born in 1884, to being one of the first women ever to graduate from Manchester University, in physics, and she was simply not prepared to be a docile, invisible widow.

“It is excellent for you not to have to pay income tax,” she wrote in her diary in 1933, recording the attitude of her in-laws towards her, “and delightful for you don’t have my worries with servants. It is a good thing for your boy to do housework all the holidays, and good training that neither of you can have any new clothes or go the theatre. … I get sick of this.” And who can blame her?

Instead of submitting she persisted, and despite many rejections, turned herself into a successful and bestselling author.

Alison could undoubtedly be difficult and spiky – otherwise she would never have achieved what she did. Yet what puzzled me, was the contemptuous tone of much of what was written about her – in the introduction to the diaries, by reviewers, and when I got hold of it, in her authorised biography: Uttley had vendettas; hated women; had no friends; fell out with everyone; nursed an incestuous, “unnatural” passion for her son; was a fantasist who remade the world as she wanted; drove her husband and son to breakdown and suicide. This was not the woman I recognised from the diaries.

Uttley’s authorised biography

So what is the truth about Alison Uttley?

The Enid Blyton accusation

Let’s look at one of the claims that somehow seem to set the tone. Almost every review of Uttley’s biography or diaries repeated the claim that Uttley nursed a life-long vendetta against popular children’s author Enid Blyton. According to one critic, Uttley moved to Beaconsfield specifically because Blyton lived there. The two writers were “neighbours” and Uttley never disguised her hostility to Blyton, whom she described as a “vulgar, curled woman”.

Enid Blyton’s house - NOT next door to Alison’s. credit: MilborneOne, CC BY-SA via WikiCommons

Uttley could hardly not be aware of Enid Blyton, who was an astonishingly prolific and successful writer of children’s books. Blyton was not only the popular creator of the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, Noddy, Mallory Towers and more, but she was also a one-woman publicity machine. A magazine was devoted to her, and she often hosted fans at her home. If Uttley did look down on her work, and grudged her success, she would not have been alone. Contemporary Noel Streatfield, the author of Ballet Shoes, commented acidly, “I think one of Miss Blyton’s great qualities is that she doesn’t strain any child’s brain.” The BBC famously refused to broadcast Blyton’s work on the basis that it lacked literary merit; schools and libraries sometimes refused to stock Blyton for the same reason. Her ardent child readership did not agree, and during World War II, Blyton’s readership was so vast that the amount of paper kept back for her books, at a time of paper shortages, inevitably impacted other authors.

So disparaging remarks aren’t surprising. But a feud? The truth is, nothing of the sort seems to have occurred. Uttley’s published diaries cover over forty years, and the reality is that in all that time Uttley seems to have met Blyton once. Once. Well, twice, if you include the time she stood next to her at the fishmonger.

In Uttley’s own words, in her diary, on Blyton’s death in 1968, “we only met once, and when I asked her which books we wrote, she replied, “Look in Smith’s window,” and turned away”. This inconsequential meeting seems to have occurred at a lunch where Uttley offended Blyton by confusing her with another writer. The encounter at the fishmonger’s was the only other time their paths crossed.

Other than this, Uttley barely mentions Blyton. In 1941 she describes a friend, Katharine Wig, going into her local WH Smith to ask for Alison’s books, only to be told that they are not popular enough to be stocked, unlike Enid Blyton’s. “They sell marvellously!” the bookseller comments. This incident must have been crushing, and it prompted Uttley’s, “vulgar, curled” comment. It’s not a nice remark (nor is her description of Blyton “ogling” at the fishmonger) but it doesn’t amount to a vendetta. The idea of an obsession, or that Uttley was a “neighbour” in any sense other than living in the same town, or that she might have deliberately moved there in pursuit of Blyton, is nonsense.

And yet the Blyton references have been allowed to define Uttley.

It’s worth noting that Enid Blyton herself has attracted criticism for not dissimilar reasons to Uttley. Above all, she has been seen as a bad mother (a claim against Uttley I’ll look at in a later post) who took refuge from actual motherhood in the fantasy of her invented characters, and preferred the company of reverential child fans to her own progeny. Whether this is fair or not – Blyton’s own children disagreed on the matter – it raises similar questions as with Uttley. Perhaps it’s impossible to be a prolific and successful writer and a traditionally attentive mother? Or perhaps it is impossible for a prolific woman writer not to be accused of maternal failings?

The supposed Blyton feud helps to reinforce other claims against Uttley, such as that she hated women and either had no friends or always fell out with them. Or the even more seriously that she indulged incestuous passions for her own child, and drove family members to suicide.

I’ll consider these in the next post.