Everything about Edith Nesbit totally explained
Edith Nesbit (married name
Edith Bland;
15 August 1858 -
4 May 1924) was an
English author and poet whose children's works were published under the
androgynous name of
E. Nesbit. She wrote or collaborated on over 60 books of
fiction for children, several of which have been adapted for film and television. She was also a political activist and co-founded the
Fabian Society, a precursor to the modern
Labour Party.
Biography
She was born in 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane in
Kennington,
Surrey (now part of
Greater London), the daughter of an agricultural chemist,
John Collis Nesbit, who died in March 1862, before her fourth birthday. Her sister Mary's ill health meant that the family moved around constantly for some years, living variously in
Brighton,
Buckinghamshire,
France (
Dieppe,
Rouen,
Paris,
Tours,
Poitiers,
Angouleme,
Bordeaux,
Arcachon,
Pau,
Bagneres de Bigorre, and
Dinan in
Brittany),
Spain and
Germany, before settling for three years at Halstead Hall in
Halstead in north-west
Kent, a location which later inspired
The Railway Children (this distinction has also been claimed by the
Derbyshire town of
New Mills).
When Nesbit was 17, the family moved again, this time back to London, living variously in South East London at
Eltham,
Lewisham,
Grove Park and
Lee.
A follower of
William Morris, 19-year-old Nesbit met bank clerk
Hubert Bland in 1877. Seven months pregnant, she married Bland on
22 April 1880, though she didn't immediately live with him, as Bland initially continued to live with his mother. Their marriage was an
open one. Bland also continued an affair with Alice Hoatson which produced two children (Rosamund in 1886 and John in 1899), both of whom Nesbit raised as her own. Her own children were Paul Bland (1880-1940), to whom
The Railway Children was dedicated; Iris Bland (1881-19??); and Fabian Bland (1885-1900), who died aged 15 after a
tonsil operation, and to whom she dedicated
Five Children And It and its sequels, as well as
The Story of the Treasure Seekers and its sequels.
Nesbit and Bland were among the founders of the
Fabian Society (a precursor to the
Labour Party) in 1884. Their son Fabian was named after the society. They also jointly edited the Society's journal
Today; Hoatson was the Society's assistant secretary. Nesbit and Bland also dallied briefly with the
Social Democratic Federation, but rejected it as too radical. Nesbit was an active lecturer and prolific writer on socialism during the 1880s. Nesbit also wrote with her husband under the name "Fabian Bland", though this activity dwindled as her success as a children's author grew.
Nesbit lived from 1899 to 1920 in Well Hall House,
Eltham, Kent (now in south-east Greater London). On
20 February 1917, some three years after Bland died, Nesbit married Thomas "the Skipper" Tucker, a ship's engineer on the
Woolwich Ferry. She was a guest speaker at the
London School of Economics.
Towards the end of her life she moved to a house called "Crowlink" in
Friston,
East Sussex, and later to
St Mary's Bay in
Romney Marsh, East Kent. Suffering from
lung cancer, probably a result of her heavy smoking, she died in 1924 at
New Romney, Kent, and was buried in the churchyard of
St Mary in the Marsh.
Literature
Nesbit published approximately 40 books for children, both novels and collections of stories. Collaborating with others, she published almost as many more.
According to her biographer Julia Briggs, Nesbit was "the first modern writer for children":
"(Nesbit) 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 having invented the children's
adventure story.
Among Nesbit's best-known books are
The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1898) and
The Wouldbegoods (1899), which both recount stories about the Bastables, a
middle class family that has fallen on relatively hard times. Her children's writing also included numerous plays and collections of
verse.
She created an innovative style of children's
magic realism that combined realistic, contemporary children in real-world settings with magical objects and adventures and sometimes travel to fantastic worlds. In doing so, she was a direct or indirect influence on many subsequent writers, including
P. L. Travers (author of
Mary Poppins),
Edward Eager,
Diana Wynne Jones and
J. K. Rowling.
C. S. Lewis wrote of her influence on his
Narnia series and mentions the Bastable children in
The Magician's Nephew.
Michael Moorcock would go on to write a series of
steampunk novels with an adult Oswald Bastable (of
The Treasure Seekers) as the lead character.
Selected works
Anthologies
Before Armageddon: An Anthology of Victorian and Edwardian Imaginative Fiction Published Before 1914 (1976)Further Information
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