From Beatrix to Harry, children's books are increasingly popular - but do we need to know about the authors' often unhappy home lives? Suzanne Lynch, who went to a London exhibition on 100 years of children's writers, doesn't think so
At A time when children's literature is enjoying a period of unrivalled popularity, the timing of an exhibition on children's writers currently running at London's National Portrait Gallery couldn't be better. This exhibition celebrates 100 years of children's writing by focusing on the authors of our best-loved stories. Beginning with Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit Tales published in 1902 and culminating with J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, the exhibition uses paintings and portraits from the Gallery's collection to reveal the faces behind the most enduring children's stories of the last century.
The pictures on display, however, are deceptively idyllic - a glimpse into the personal life of some of the best-known names reveals a reality very different from the stuff of fairytales. While many of the portraits show the authors in blissful poses with their families, their own domestic lives were often unhappy.
Christopher Robin Milne, the inspiration behind Christopher Robin in Winnie the Pooh, bitterly remarked in later years that his father had built his fame "standing on the shoulders of a small boy". Ironically, the 1926 portrait of Milne shows father and son in a loving pose holding the teddy-bear that inspired Winnie the Pooh.
The personal life of Enid Blyton is more notorious. The picture of the author and her youngest daughter Imogen, taken at the height of Blyton's career, masks the difficult relationship between mother and daughter that existed in reality. As the J.K. Rowling of her time, Enid Blyton was one of the most successful children's writers of the 20th century, earning at one point an estimated £100,000 a year and producing more than 50 books a year. A well-crafted image of domestic bliss was promoted in her journalism where she regularly described her family life to her young readers. But life at "Green Hedges" - the address to which thousands of children wrote to her every year - was not the homestead of apple pie and ginger beer painted in her novels. Her astonishing output during the 1940s and 1950s - she could churn out anything up to 10,000 words a day - placed enormous pressure on her own family life.
In her 1989 autobiography, Imogen reveals what it was like to live with the real Enid Blyton: "Her feeling for her readers and for all children in the abstract was intense and loving; but as one of her two children who should have been the closest to her of all, I saw her only as a distant authority, a clever person, a strong and imaginative actress on the little stage of my life but never, or almost never, a mother."
Blyton's own childhood was far from happy. The father whom she loved abandoned the family when she was 13. Enid's difficult relationship with her mother intensified and she eventually became estranged from her family. Her first marriage broke down acrimoniously and while she re-married, the possibility of homosexual tendencies is hinted at in sketches of her life, although her daughter earnestly denies this. With her domineering child-like personality and vivid imagination, it seems that Enid Blyton in many ways remained a child who never grew up.
This pattern of an unhappy childhood can be traced in other writers for children. C.S. Lewis, famed for his Chronicles of Narnia, lost his mother at the age of 12, and subsequently became estranged from his father. In his autobiography, he recalls the effect of his early loss: "With my mother's death, all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life". Kenneth Grahame, author of Wind in the Willows; Frances Hodgson Burnett who wrote The Secret Garden; and J.R.R. Tolkien all lost a parent when young. It is tempting to conclude that these authors created fantasy worlds as a means of escaping from their own unhappiness. It seems that the magic and fairytale that have delighted thousands of readers may have also functioned as a comfort to the authors themselves.
But the story isn't quite so bleak for other writers in the exhibition.
One of the most interesting points to emerge from the exhibition is the way in which children are involved in the writing process. Many stories were initially conceived as tales for particular children. The character of Doctor Dolittle was created by Hugh Lofting in his letters home to his children while away during the first World War. The genesis of Peter Rabbit can be found in a letter written by Beatrix Potter to the sick son of a friend. One of the most celebrated of authors, Roald Dahl, was chiefly an adult writer but turned to children's writing when his own children were born. Even Ted Hughes, who is not famed for his children writing, dedicated his children's poems of the 1960s to his two children by his first marriage to Sylvia Plath.
But is our experience of children's literature enhanced by opening up the private lives of their authors to scrutiny in this way? Unlike Enid Blyton, most children's writers are notoriously reclusive. The image of J.K. Rowling retreating from the glare of media attention shows how unwanted such interest can be. Probing into the lives of these authors opens up perturbing questions about motive and agency in their art.
The perennial power of the imaginary worlds created in children's fiction suggests that these classics can stand on their own. The book that accompanies this exhibition is noticeably reticent about the troubled lives and childhoods of the writers, but perhaps it is better not to pry - these authors have given readers free reign to their imagination, is it right that we should want access to their personal lives as well? The children running around the National Portrait Gallery don't seem to think so - they were busy looking at the books on display and chattering about the latest Harry Potter.
Revealing the reality behind the fantasy of this fiction serves to dispel the imaginative quality that is so intrinsic to children's writing. It is this we need to preserve, and besides, the children are too busy reading to listen anyway.
Beatrix Potter to Harry Potter: Portraits of Children's Writers is at the National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place, London, until August 26th. Admission free. Tel: 0044-2073060055. Website: www.
npg.org.uk