The Malory Towers books – for anyone whose childhood was cruelly deprived of them – are Enid Blyton’s series of raucous stories set in a girls’ boarding school in postwar Britain. They are heartwarming. They are funny. The one thing they’re apparently not, though, is current.
On the face of it, tales of classroom tricks and Cornish cliffs have little to say to those growing up in the modern, digital world. Then there’s the matter of Blyton’s class snobbery, racism and sexism; even though Malory Towers is more forward-looking than the rest of her catalogue, admitting you’re a fan is often received as tacit admittance that you have a secret shrine to Nigel Farage in your basement.
But as devotees like me have long maintained, the prevailing messages are ones of tolerance, community and female power. No bad thing, then, that it’s enjoying an unexpected rebirth. Last week CBBC announced it had commissioned a Malory Towers adaptation to air in 2020. Meanwhile, a stage version produced by Wise Children, the theatre company led by former Shakespeare’s Globe director Emma Rice, is about to go on tour. Then there’s a volume of four new stories written by modern authors.
Malory Towers is said to still be a big seller (like the rest of Blyton’s books: she’s amassed more than 500m worldwide sales). But the franchise is now fashionable rather than just lucrative. Why have tales of common room sing-songs and half-term teas been swept up by the zeitgeist?
The series was written between 1946 and 1951, when Clement Attlee’s Labour government was nursing the country back to health after the war. For Rice, this means Malory Towers is imbued with hope and goodwill – attitudes useful in the current political climate.
“We want to look into faces not of rage and bitterness but of hope and truth, like Greta Thunberg and all the brave young climate change activists,” she says. Lucy Mangan, journalist and author of one of the new stories, can also spot a political resonance: “The books are set in a stable, unchanging, enclosed, safe little world – which we all hanker for at some time or another, and I suspect more than ever now that everything seems to be going to hell in a handcart.”
Blyton is hardly a common source of feminist inspiration. But with Malory Towers’s emphasis on women’s potential, it arguably chimes with current conversations around gender. Indeed, the stage production is billed as “the original ‘Girl Power’ story”. Rice points out that the all-female character list means it aces the Bechdel test, which measures the representation of women in works of art. “I love how uninterested in traditional ideas of femininity the characters are,” she says. “It’s such an empowering picture of girlhood for young people today. Nobody is asking them to conform.”
It would be preposterous, however, to suggest that such feminism caters for an audience beyond posh white girls. In contrast, the new wave of Malory Towers adaptations is resoundingly diverse. Rice’s production features BAME and non-binary trans actors in the lead roles. “These stories are to be enjoyed by everyone and, for that to make sense, the young people in the audience need to be able to see themselves onstage,” she says. And while it’s early days for the BBC adaptation, commissioning editor Amy Buscombe says “casting will be as representative as you’d expect for a modern CBBC production.”
New Class At Malory Towers, the collection of new stories, also updates Blyton’s all-white cast. Narinder Dhami’s story centres on an Indian pupil called Sunita, while Patrice Lawrence portrays Marietta, a mixed-race girl. Lawrence points out that Blyton’s originals are dodgy when it comes to representation: “I’ve met people who were at boarding school whose parents sent them from overseas in the 40s and 50s. We also know that people from African and Caribbean descent have been here for a very long time.”
When Lawrence was growing up in an Italian-Trinidadian family in Sussex, she says she had to do an “ethnic hop” to enjoy literature. She hopes that inclusive updates will save future generations from doing the same: “For a woman to see someone like her in something as iconic as Malory Towers is a really big deal.”
Not all modern tweaks are welcomed; in 2016, “sensitive revisions” of Blyton’s Famous Five books were famously pulled from sales in favour of the originals. But beyond the unmistakably white lineup, there are anachronistic elements of Malory Towers that patently need modernising if they’re to be adapted for new forms – the fat-shaming for one.
How can we update classics without eradicating what makes them distinctive? “You take the bits you love and quietly leave the rest behind,” says Rice. And while Mangan is “quite anti mucking about with the originals” because of their historical context, she reckons that “if you are writing new stuff, you should jettison as many of the unfortunate things as you can”.
One of the most appealing aspects of Malory Towers is how forward-looking and resourceful (most of) the characters are. There is a neat symmetry in how the series’s renaissance is being led by open-minded, inventive storytellers – many of whom are women. In cutting old-fashioned tropes and foregrounding the books’ best aspects – humour, friendship, the emphasis on women discovering themselves in a space almost entirely absent of men – a sparky, emboldening series has been preserved for new generations. That’s something to celebrate, perhaps with lashings of something stronger than ginger beer.
Malory Towers opens at the Passenger Shed in Bristol on 19 July, then tours the UK. New Class at Malory Towers is published by Hodder
Haven’t read the books? Here’s a glossary to help
Darrell Rivers
Protagonist whom the books follow through her six years at school. Loyal, good-hearted and incapable of stopping herself losing her rag around...
Gwendoline Mary Lacey
Spoilt, spiteful pupil who enjoys brushing her hair, scowling and acting as a vehicle through which Blyton can relay a succession of clumsy cautionary tales.
North Tower
Part of the castle-like school where the main characters Darrell and Gwendoline are joined by stolid Sally, sharp-tongued Alicia and nervy Mary-Lou in a “dormy”.
Potty
Nickname for Miss Potts, first-form mistress and head of North Tower. Not remotely deranged, unlike Mademoiselles Dupont and Rougier, the French teachers.
Alicia’s ‘deafness’
One of the tricks the girls play on teachers. Other memorable pranks include sneezing pellets, and removing the hairpins from the mademoiselles’ buns with a magnet.
