Edith Nesbit (married name Edith Bland; 15 August 1858 – 4 May 1924) was an English writer and poet, who published her books for children and others as E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on more than 60 such books. She was also a political activist and co-founder of the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation later affiliated to the Labour Party.
Contents
Biography
Nesbit was born in 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane, Kennington, Surrey (now London), the daughter of an agricultural chemist, John Collis Nesbit, who died in March 1862, before her fourth birthday. Her mother was Sarah Green (née Alderton).
The ill health of Nesbit'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.
After Mary's death, Nesbit 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.
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.
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, Maggie Doran, who lived with his mother, believed she was Hubert's fiancée and had likewise borne him a child.
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, and Fabian Bland (1885–1900).
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.
Writing
Career
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". In all she published about 40 books for children, including novels, storybooks and picture books. Works of William Shakespeare adapted by her for children have been translated.
She also published almost as many books jointly with others. With her husband she co-wrote fiction under the pseudonym "Fabian Bland" from 1884 until the late 1890s. One of these joint novels, The Prophet's Mantle, (1885) was inspired by the life of Peter Kropotkin in London. Nesbit's biographer Julia Briggs calls it a "book with a strikingly ingenious and complex plot". It received favourable reviews upon its publication, and appears to have sold steadily. After this, Bland concentrated on his journalism and political writings, while Nesbit's success as a children's author grew.
2011 plagiarism allegation
In 2011, a book was published by the granddaughter of Ada J. Graves that suggested that Nesbit had "plagiarised" parts of the plot of The Railway Children from The House by the Railway by Graves. It was asserted that the Graves book had appeared in 1896, nine years prior to The Railway Children, and various similarities between the two books were identified. Subsequent studies disagreed with that conclusion: Online magazine Tor.com discovered that although the Graves book was part of a series started in 1896, that particular book wasn't published until 1906, so both books had actually been released in 1906. Some other similarities were also suggested to be mere coincidences, although it was acknowledged that Nesbit sometimes repeated plot elements in her own books and also used ideas from others, such as H. G. Wells.
Legacy and influence
Nesbit's biographer Julia Briggs calls 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". Briggs also credits Nesbit with inventing the children's adventure story. 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."
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." Her children's writing also included plays and collections of verse.
Nesbit has been cited as the creator of modern children's fantasy. 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. 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 and mentions the Bastable children in The Magician's Nephew, which, in its scenes of Jadis (a.k.a. the White Witch) in 19th century London, borrows from a similar sequences in Nesbit's The Story of the Amulet.
Use of Nesbit's characters by later writers
Science fiction and fantasy writer Michael Moorcock adopted Nesbit's character of Oswald Bastable for a trilogy of steampunk novels beginning with The Warlord of the Air.
Five Children and It has had a number of continuation novels by later writers.
Legacy
Places
Edith Nesbit Walk and cycleway runs along the south side of Well Hall Pleasaunce in Eltham.
Lee Green, also in south-east London, has Edith Nesbit Gardens.
A 200-metre footpath in Grove Park south-east London, between Baring Road and Reigate Road, is named Railway Children Walk after the novel, as is one in Oxenhope, a film location on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway used in the 1970 film.
There is a Nesbit Road in St Mary's Bay, Romney Marsh, where Nesbit's home Long Boat & Jolly Boat stands.
Nesbit House, a care home at Badgers Mount, Kent, is located near Halstead Hall where Edith Nesbit lived when she was young.
Other legacy
Actress Judy Parfitt portrayed Nesbit in the 1972–1973 miniseries The Edwardians
The Edith Nesbit Society was founded in 1996 with Dame Jacqueline Wilson as president.
In The Guardian in 2001, Francis Spufford placed The Story of the Amulet first on his list of greatest children's books.
A. S. Byatt's 2009 novel The Children's Book is inspired partly by Nesbit, who appears as a character along with Kenneth Grahame and J. M. Barrie.
Nesbit's life inspired a one-act, one-woman play, Larks and Magic, by Alison Neil, in 2018.
Several of Nesbit's horror short stories were adapted into the anthology play The Shadow in the Dark by Oliver Giggins and Ash Pryce, which also drew on elements of Nesbit's own life and fears taken from her autobiographical writings. The show premiered at the Edinburgh Horror Festival in 2023. Oliver Giggins followed it up with two further adaptations of Nesbit ghost stories, with The Ebony Frame (based on "The Ebony Frame, From The Dead" and "Uncle Abraham's Romance") in 2024 and The Lady In White (based on The White Lady) in 2025.
American children's book author Edward Eager considered Nesbit the best children's author of all time; his books have been compared to Nesbit's and his characters are often fans of her work.
Woman of Stone, the Christmas Eve 2024 episode of the BBC's 'A Ghost Story for Christmas' strand, is an adaptation of Nesbit's horror story Man-Size in Marble. The film, written and directed by Mark Gatiss, features Celia Imrie as Nesbit.
Biographies
Aside from an episode of the BBC's 'A Ghost Story for Christmas' from her autobiographical Long Ago When I was Young (published 1966), Nesbit has been the subject of 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
Works
Novels for children
1899 The Story of the Treasure Seekers
1901 The Wouldbegoods
1904 New Treasure Seekers
The Complete History of the Bastable Family (1928) is a posthumous omnibus of the three Bastable novels, but does not include the four stories appearing in the 1905 collection Oswald Bastable and Others. The Bastables also feature in the 1902 adult novel The Red House.
1902 Five Children and It
1904 The Phoenix and the Carpet
1906 The Story of the Amulet
1908 The House of Arden
1909 Harding's Luck
Novels for adults
The Prophet's Mantle. Serialised, Weekly Dispatch, 3 August–14 December 1884, published 1889
The Hour before Day. Serialised, Weekly Dispatch, 1885
Something Wrong. Serialised, Weekly Dispatch, 7 March to 4 July 1886
The Marden Mystery (rare: few if any copies survive)
1893 Her Marriage Lines. Serialised, Weekly Dispatch, 1893
1898 The Secret of Kyriels
1902 The Red House (featuring the Bastables from the children's books featuring them)
1906 The Incomplete Amorist
1909 Salome and the Head (a.k.a. The House with No Address)
1909 Daphne in Fitzroy Street
1911 Dormant (a.k.a. Rose Royal in the US)
1916 The Incredible Honeymoon
1922 The Lark
Few copies of The Secret of Kyriels survive.
Short fiction for adults
"Psychical Research". Longman's Magazine, December 1884
"The Fabric of a Vision". Argosy, March 1885
"An Angel Unawares". Weekly Dispatch, 9 August 1885
"Desperate Conspirator". Weekly Dispatch, 15 May 1887
"A Pot of Money". Weekly Dispatch, 21 August 1887
"Christmas Roses". Weekly Dispatch, 25 December 1887
"High Social Position". Weekly Dispatch, 8 July 1888
"Mind and Money". Weekly Dispatch, 16 September 1888
"Getting into Society". Weekly Dispatch, 30 September 1888
"A Drama of Exile". Weekly Dispatch, 21 October 1888
"A Pious Fraud". Weekly Dispatch, 11 November 1888
"Her First Appearance". Weekly Dispatch, 16 December 1888
"Which Wins?" Murray's Magazine, December 1888
"Only a Joke". Longman's Magazine, August 1889
"The Golden Girl". Weekly Dispatch, 21 December 1890
"The Third Drug", Strand Magazine, February 1908 (a.k.a. "The Three Drugs")
"Uncle Abraham's Romance". Illustrated London News, 26 September 1891
Short story collections for adults
Grim Tales (horror stories), 1893
"The Ebony Frame", "John Charrington's Wedding", "Uncle Abraham's Romance", "The Mystery of the Semi-Detached", "From the Dead", "Man-Size in Marble", "The Mass for the Dead"
Something Wrong (horror stories), 1893
In Homespun (10 stories "written in an English dialect" of South Kent and Sussex), 1896
The Literary Sense (18 stories), 1903
Man and Maid (10 stories), 1906 (some supernatural stories)
Fear (horror stories), 1910
Collected Supernatural Stories, 2000
"Dormant" ("Rose Royal"), "Man-size in Marble", "The Detective", "No. 17", "John Charrington's Wedding", "The Blue Rose", "The Haunted House", "The House With No Address" ("Salome and the Head"), "The Haunted Inheritance", "The House of Silence", "The Letter in Brown Ink", "The Shadow", "The New Samson", "The Pavilion"
From the Dead: The Complete Weird Stories of E Nesbit, 2005
"Introduction" (by S. T. Joshi), "John Charrington's Wedding", "The Ebony Frame", "The Mass for the Dead", "From the Dead", "Uncle Abraham's Romance", "The Mystery of the Semi-Detached", "Man-Size in Marble", "Hurst of Hurstcote", "The Power of Darkness", "The Shadow", "The Head", "The Three Drugs", "In the Dark", "The New Samson", "Number 17", "The Five Senses", "The Violet Car", "The Haunted House", "The Pavilion", "From My School-Days", "In the Dark", "The Mummies at Bordeaux"
The Power of Darkness: Tales of Terror, 2006
"Man-Size in Marble", "Uncle Abraham's Romance", "From the Dead", "The Three Drugs", "The Violet Car", "John Charrington's Wedding", "The Pavilion", "Hurst of Hurstcote", "In the Dark", "The Head", "The Mystery of the Semi-detached", "The Ebony Frame", "The Five Senses", "The Shadow", "The Power of Darkness", "The Haunted Inheritance", "The Letter in Brown Ink", "The House of Silence", "The Haunted House", "The Detective"
Non-fiction
No pieces yet traced
"Women and Socialism: from the Middle-Class Point of View". Justice, 4 and 11 April 1885
"Women and Socialism: A Working Woman's Point of View". Justice, 25 April 1885
Wings and the Child, or The Building of Magic Cities, 1913
Long Ago When I Was Young (originally a serial, 'My School-Days: Memories of Childhood', in Girl's Own Paper 1896–1897) Originally appearing as "My School-Days: Memories of Childhood" in The Girl's Own Paper between October 1896 and September 1897, Long Ago When I Was Young finally took book form in 1966, some 40 years after Nesbit's death, with an insightful introduction by Noel Streatfeild and some two dozen pen-and-ink drawings by Edward Ardizzone. The twelve chapters reproduce the instalments.
Songs
1899 Slave Song (Chappell), OCLC 60194453