ENID BLYTON’S biographer has accused publishers of bowing to political correctness by sanitising some of the children’s author’s best known books.

Barbara Stoney, backed by the Enid Blyton Society, has condemned changes introduced to make the books more palatable to today’s readers.

Dame Slap has become Dame Snap, who now scolds naughty children rather than giving them a smack.

Bessie, a black character with a name associated with slavery, is now a white girl called Beth, while in the Far Away Tree stories Fanny and Dick have been changed to Frannie and Rick.

The rigid gender divisions in the Famous Five and Secret Seven series have also been swept aside, with both sexes expected to do their fair share of domestic chores.

“I say” has been replaced by “hey”, “queer” with “odd” and “cookies” replaces “biscuits” in an attempt to appeal to the American market.

“What has happened is a lot of nonsense,” said Stoney. “I just don’t see why people can’t accept that they were written in a particular period and are a product of that.

“It’s bizarre. People are now very conscious of our ‘PC’ world, and I think that’s what’s driving it.”

In the 1980s, many of Blyton’s stories — in which Noddy was intimidated by golliwogs, gypsies branded as thieves, and housework the preserve of girls — were banned from libraries and school reading lists amid accusations of sexism and racism.

Documents discovered last year in the archives of the publisher Macmillan showed it rejected a Blyton story in 1960 for containing an “unattractive touch of old-fashioned xenophobia”.

However, Malory Towers, St Claires and Secret Seven series are to be relaunched next year and expected to become bestsellers. Stoney raises her concerns in a revised edition of her biography of Blyton, who died in 1968 at the age of 71. She said: “I just wonder where it will stop. Do we start updating Jane Austen next, or Dickens? I would call on publishers just to think about it first, and not make changes willy-nilly.”

Tony Summerfield, the founder of the Enid Blyton Society, said: “In The Adventurous Four, the characters’ names are changed from Mary and Jill to Zoe and Pippa, supposedly to bring it up to date.

“Many people do not see why the golliwogs were removed. They are just toys.”

Gillian Baverstock, Blyton’s daughter, who will speak about her mother’s work at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August, said: “You cannot expect an author to imagine what life would be like for future generations.”

Although Baverstock and her sister Imogen Smallwood backed the removal of the golliwogs from the texts in the 1980s, she cautioned against unnecessary changes.

Blyton’s books would remain true to her intentions, the publisher insisted. “The books have only been very slightly altered with the addition of decimalisation to bring them up to date,” said Margaret Conroy of Hodder.

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