This film promulgates the stories spread about that Enid Blyton was a horrible person and a cold mother. This is not factual. If you read Barbara Stoney's very accurate biography - "Enid Blyton, The Biography" with a foreword written by Miss Blyton's own daughter Gillian - you will see that she adored her children and loved both her first and second husbands. She contributed enormous amounts of teaching aids to the teachers and children of the twentieth century, and should be remembered with love and admiration. Do not take this cinematic telling of her life as factual. It isn't. In her daughter's own words - "I was very close to my mother, and talked with her freely from early childhood." which disputes the notion of her having been a cold mother. I have read her biography, and whilst this film captures the atmosphere of the time, it does not capture the true events.

I have never seen a biopic with so little sympathy for its subject. Even Hitler usually gets better treatment. Although Helena Bonham Carter delivers yet another great performance, Enid Blyton remains a very one dimensional character not to say that she is portrayed as cold and downright evil. Blyton's writing (more than 750 books) is shown as compulsive escapism from her own adulthood to an idealized childhood because her own childhood ended for her when her father left the family. Blyton seems to love children as a concept but has no emotional bond with her own daughters. As to why she treats her first husband so badly never becomes really clear, apparently it has to do with the fact that to some extent he was a father figure for her who ultimately had to disappoint her as a self fulfilling prophecy. That leaves the question open as to why her second marriage seems to work. There are occasions in that film where the viewer is just appalled by the evil of Blyton's interaction with people she loves but no one can really be evil and cold all the time. So this portray unfortunately misses the richness of any person's character and is more or less the trial of Enid Blyton. We have to bear in mind that this is fiction and not fact. If you research what her daughters say about their childhoods you find very differing accounts and the evil she shows in face to face conversation (e.g. with her driver) does not have any witnesses. My other misgiving about the film is that it is simply too short to allow character development or even orientation so that I got the impression that her children stayed forever in their teens and she was suddenly 47. All in all historic context was missing completely.

Quite by chance, British television recently showed on the same night biopics about two famous female children's authors of the early twentieth century, "Miss Potter" about Beatrix Potter and "Enid" about her younger contemporary Enid Blyton. I must admit that I never liked either of them when I was a child, although this had nothing to do with any prejudice against female writers; I continued to enjoy the works of E. Nesbit even after discovering that the "E" stood for "Edith", and I loved the historical novels of Rosemary Sutcliffe. Beatrix Potter's books, however, always struck me as twee and babyish, and as for Blyton I found her works dull and formulaic. (OK, I probably didn't use the word "formulaic" in those days, but when you had read one you had read them all. All 753 of them). I also disliked the preachy, moralistic strain in Blyton's works.In this film Blyton is played by Helena Bonham Carter, although there is no physical resemblance between them. All the photographs I have seen of Blyton show her as a severe-looking, unattractive woman, whereas Bonham Carter, in her early forties, is as lovely as she ever was. Helena, of course, was once Britain's reigning Queen of Period Drama, although she has now abdicated that particular crown in favour of Keira Knightley, with Carey Mulligan as heiress presumptive. "Enid" might appear to represent a return to the sort of role Helena was playing twenty years ago, but in fact the title character here is very different to the sweet young heroines she played in films like "Lady Jane" or "A Room with a View". As in the "Harry Potter" series, where she plays the evil Bellatrix Lestrange, she gets to play a villainess. The portrayal of Enid Blyton is this film is a remorselessly negative one. She is shown as snobbish and ruthlessly ambitious, caring for little except her own financial success. She is cold and unfeeling to her first husband, Hugh Pollock, to whom she is unfaithful. When during the war he leaves to take up an important command, she complains bitterly that he is putting his duty to his country before her. She poses as a lover of children, but neglects her own daughters Gillian and Imogen. She wants little to do with her mother and her two brothers. When she wants to marry her lover, a doctor named Kenneth Darrell Waters, she decides that she will divorce Hugh on the grounds of his (non-existent) adultery rather than allowing him to divorce her, and expects him to oblige her wishes. (There was a curious convention during the first half of the twentieth century that it was morally worse for a wife to cheat on her husband than vice versa; a woman who had been the guilty party in a divorce case would be forever branded as a harlot. Rather surprisingly, the English courts, which in other contexts held strictly to the maxim "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth", were prepared to turn a blind eye to the vast amount of perjured evidence that was manufactured to uphold the legal fiction that no married woman was ever guilty of adultery). Indeed, the only thing that seems to upset Enid is the rumour that her books are ghost-written. (This was a persistent rumour during her lifetime, largely because people could not believe that one woman could be so prolific. Today, it seems to be generally accepted that she did indeed pen every book that bears her name). Bonham Carter is a very talented actress, and her performance here is a good one, but it never becomes a really great one. Indeed, the script never gives her the chance to give a great performance, because the portrait of Blyton is so negative and one-dimensional, never allowing her any good qualities except an immense capacity for hard work. There are also good contributions from Matthew Macfadyen and Denis Lawson as Blyton's two husbands. Hugh Pollock was nine years older then his wife, whereas Macfadyen is in fact eight years younger than Bonham Carter, so the make-up department also deserve credit for making him seem credibly middle-aged. Another weakness of the film is that the early scenes were very rushed. In the space of a few minutes Enid goes from an Edwardian schoolgirl to a married, middle-aged author with two children in the 1930s. One of the film's theories is that Blyton's emotional difficulties in later life were the result of her coming from a broken home after her father, whom she idolised, left her mother, so it is unfortunate that her early life was not examined in greater detail. I never met Enid Blyton- she died when I was a young child- so for all I know she might have been every bit as unpleasant as the character portrayed here. I just wondered why the film-makers bothered to make a biopic of someone they obviously regarded as a prize bitch. 6/10

This drama, the first in a series entitled 'Women We Loved', has Helena Bonham-Carter portraying children's writer Enid Blyton. Although she is very good, and ably supported by Matthew McFadyen and Denis Lawson as her two husbands, this story suffers by presenting Blyton as one-dimensional, uncaring of her own family, and single-minded about her writing.Sumptuously shot and accurate to the time in which it is set, 'Enid' is nevertheless strangely unsatisfying, and I really would have liked to have seen a more rounded piece of biography. Yes, Blyton probably did have many faults, but according to this she is only one step back from the Wicked Witch of the West!