E. Nesbit

Nesbit was born in 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane, Kennington, Surrey (now classified as Inner London),[lower-alpha 1] the daughter of an agricultural chemist, John Collis Nesbit, who died in March 1862, before her fourth birthday.[2] Her mother was Sarah Green (née Alderton).

The ill health of Edith's sister Mary meant that the family travelled for some years, living variously in Brighton, Buckinghamshire, France (Dieppe, Rouen, Paris, Tours, Poitiers, Angoulême, Bordeaux, Arcachon, Pau, Bagnères-de-Bigorre, and Dinan in Brittany), Spain and Germany. Mary was engaged in 1871 to the poet Philip Bourke Marston, but later that year she died of tuberculosis in Normandy.[3]

After Mary's death, Edith and her mother settled for three years at Halstead Hall, Halstead, north-west Kent, a location that inspired The Railway Children, although the distinction has also been claimed by the Derbyshire town of New Mills.[4]

When Nesbit was 17, the family moved back to Lewisham in south-east London. There is a Lewisham Council plaque to her at 28 Elswick Road.[5]

In 1877, at the age of 18, Nesbit met the bank clerk Hubert Bland, her elder by three years. Seven months pregnant, she married Bland on 22 April 1880, but did not initially live with him, as Bland remained with his mother. Their marriage was tumultuous. Early on, Nesbit found that another woman believed she was Hubert's fiancée and had also borne him a child. A more serious blow came in 1886, when she discovered that her friend, Alice Hoatson, was pregnant by him. She had previously agreed to adopt Hoatson's child and allow Hoatson to live with her as their housekeeper. After she discovered the truth, she and her husband quarrelled violently and she suggested that Hoatson and the baby, Rosamund, should leave; her husband threatened to leave Edith if she disowned the baby and its mother. Hoatson remained with them as a housekeeper and secretary and became pregnant by Bland again 13 years later. Edith again adopted Hoatson's child, John.[6]

Nesbit's children by Bland were Paul Cyril Bland (1880–1940), to whom The Railway Children was dedicated, Mary Iris Bland (1881–1965), who married John Austin D Phillips in 1907,[7] and Fabian Bland (1885–1900). Bland's two children by Alice Hoatson, whom Edith adopted, were Rosamund Edith Nesbit Hamilton, later Bland (1886–1950), who married Clifford Dyer Sharp on 16 October 1909,[8] and to whom The Book of Dragons was dedicated, and John Oliver Wentworth Bland (1899–1946) to whom The House of Arden and Five Children and It were dedicated.[9][10] Nesbit's son Fabian died aged 15 after a tonsil operation; Nesbit dedicated several books to him, including The Story of the Treasure Seekers and its sequels. Nesbit's adopted daughter Rosamund collaborated with her on Cat Tales.

E. Nesbit's grave in St Mary in the Marsh's churchyard bears a wooden marker by her second husband, Thomas Terry Tucker. There is also a memorial plaque to her inside the church.

Nesbit admired the artist and Marxian socialist William Morris.[11][12] The couple joined the founders of the Fabian Society in 1884,[13] after which their son Fabian was named,[2] and jointly edited its journal Today. Hoatson was its assistant secretary. Nesbit and Bland dallied with the Social Democratic Federation, but found it too radical. Nesbit was a prolific lecturer and writer on socialism in the 1880s. She and her husband co-wrote under the pseudonym "Fabian Bland",[14] However, the joint work dwindled as her success rose as a children's author. She was a guest speaker at the London School of Economics, which had been founded by other Fabian Society members.

Edith lived from 1899 to 1920 at Well Hall, Eltham, in south-east London,[15] which makes fictional appearances in several of her books, such as The Red House. From 1911 she kept a second home on the Sussex Downs at Crowlink, Friston, East Sussex.[16] She and her husband entertained many friends, colleagues and admirers at Well Hall.[17]

On 20 February 1917, some three years after Bland died, Nesbit married Thomas "the Skipper" Tucker in Woolwich, where he was captain of the Woolwich Ferry.

Towards the end of her life, Nesbit moved first to Crowlink, then with the skipper to two conjoined properties which were Royal Flying Corps buildings, 'Jolly Boat' and 'Long Boat'. Nesbit lived in 'Jolly Boat' and the Skipper in 'Long Boat'. Nesbit died in 'The Long Boat' at Jesson, St Mary's Bay, New Romney, Kent, in 1924, probably from lung cancer (she "smoked incessantly"),[18] and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary in the Marsh. Her husband Thomas died at the same address on 17 May 1935. Edith's son Paul Bland was an executor of Thomas Tucker's will.

Nesbit's first published works were poems. She was under 20 in March 1878, when the monthly magazine Good Words printed her poem "Under the Trees".[19] In all she published about 40 books for children, including novels, storybooks and picture books.[20] She also published almost as many books jointly with others.

Nesbit's biographer, Julia Briggs, names her "the first modern writer for children", who "helped to reverse the great tradition of children's literature inaugurated by Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald and Kenneth Grahame, in turning away from their secondary worlds to the tough truths to be won from encounters with things-as-they-are, previously the province of adult novels".[21] Briggs also credits Nesbit with inventing the children's adventure story.[22] Noël Coward was an admirer. In a letter to an early biographer, Noel Streatfeild wrote, "She had an economy of phrase and an unparalleled talent for evoking hot summer days in the English countryside."[23]

Among Nesbit's best-known books are The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) and The Wouldbegoods (1901), which tell of the Bastables, a middle-class family fallen on relatively hard times. The Railway Children is also popularised by a 1970 film version. Gore Vidal called the time-travel book, The Story of the Amulet, one where "Nesbit's powers of invention are at their best."[24] Her children's writing also included plays and collections of verse.

Nesbit has been cited as the creator of modern children's fantasy.[25] Her innovations placed realistic contemporary children in real-world settings with magical objects (which would now be classed as contemporary fantasy) and adventures and sometimes travel to fantastic worlds.[26] This influenced directly or indirectly many later writers, including P. L. Travers (of Mary Poppins), Edward Eager, Diana Wynne Jones and J. K. Rowling. C. S. Lewis too paid heed to her in the Narnia series[27] and mentions the Bastable children in The Magician's Nephew. Michael Moorcock later wrote a series of steampunk novels around an adult Oswald Bastable of The Treasure Seekers. In 2012, Jacqueline Wilson wrote a sequel to the Psammead trilogy: Four Children and It.

Nesbit also wrote for adults, including eleven novels, short stories, and four collections of horror stories.

In 2011, Nesbit was accused of plagiarising the plot of The Railway Children from The House by the Railway by Ada J. Graves. The Telegraph reported that the Graves book had appeared in 1896, nine years before The Railway Children, and listed similarities between them.[28] However, not all sources agree on this finding:[29] The magazine Tor.com posited an error in the earlier news reports, saying both books had been released in the same year, 1906.[30]

In The New Yorker, Jessica Winter has noted that Nesbit's books are at times "blighted by racist and colonialist language and anti-Semitic tropes". Although she was the family breadwinner and has the father in The Railway Children declare that "Girls are just as clever as boys, and don’t you forget it!", she did not champion women's rights. "She opposed the cause of women’s suffrage—mainly, she claimed, because women could swing Tory, thus harming the Socialist cause."[31] She is said to have avoided the literary moralizing that characterized the age. "And, most crucially, both books are constructed from a blueprint that is also a kind of reënactment of the author’s own childhood: an idyll torn up at its roots by the exigencies of illness, loss, and grief."[31]

Aside from her autobiographical Long Ago When I was Young 1966), Nesbit has spawned five biographies.

• Doris Langley Moore E. Nesbit, 1933
• Noel Streatfeild, Magic and the Magician: E. Nesbit and her Children’s Books, 1958
• Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion, 1987
• Elisabeth Galvin, The Extraordinary Life of E. Nesbit, 2018
• Eleanor Fitzsimons, The Life and Loves of E Nesbit, 2019[45]

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Edith Nesbit

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Edith Nesbit.

• E. Nesbit at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• "The Writing of E. Nesbit" by Gore Vidal, The New York Review of Books, 3 December 1964
• "Lost Lives: Edith Bland" by Bill Greenwell
• Nesbit at YourDictionary.com (reprint from Encyclopedia of World Biography)
• E. Nesbit at Library of Congress, with 140 library catalogue records
• Rosamund E. Nesbit Bland at LC Authorities, with 2 records, and at WorldCat
• Eager, Edward (1 October 1958). "Daily Magic". The Horn Book Magazine. Retrieved 14 May 2020.

Online texts

• Works by E. Nesbit in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
• Works by Edith Nesbit at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Edith (née Bland) Nesbit at Faded Page (Canada)
• Works by or about E. Nesbit at Internet Archive
• Works by E. Nesbit at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Melisande by E. Nesbit Archived 12 December 2003 at the Wayback Machine, a tale similar to Rapunzel
• My School Days (article series by Nesbit)
• The Magic World