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Edith Nesbit
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 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.
Nesbit 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, Angoulême,
Bordeaux, Arcachon, Pau, Bagnères-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 did not immediately
live with him, as Bland initially continued to live with his mother. Their
marriage was a stormy one. Early on Edith discovered another woman believed she
was Hubert's fiancee and had also borne him a child. A more serious blow came
later when Edith discovered that her good friend, Alice Hoatson, was pregnant
with Hubert's child. Edith had already agreed to adopt Hoatson's child and
allow Hoatson to live with her as their housekeeper. When she discovered the
truth, Edith quarreled violently with her husband and suggested that Hoatson
and the baby should leave; Hubert 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 Hubert again 13 years later. Edith again adopted
Hoatson's child.
Nesbit's children were
Paul Bland (1880–1940), to whom The Railway Children was dedicated; Iris Bland
(1881-1950s); Fabian Bland (1885–1900); Rosamund Bland (1886-?), to whom The
Book of Dragons was dedicated; and John Bland (1899 -?) to whom The House of
Arden was dedicated. Her son Fabian died aged 15 after a tonsil operation, and
Nesbit dedicated a number of books to him: Five Children And It and its
sequels, as well as The Story of the Treasure Seekers and its sequels. Nesbit's
daughter Rosamund collaborated with her on the book Cat Tales.
E. Nesbit's grave in St
Mary in the Marsh's churchyard bears a wooden grave marker made by her second
husband, Thomas Terry Tucker. There is also a memorial plaque to her inside the
church.
Nesbit and Bland were
among the founders of the Fabian Society 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),
which appears in fictional guise in several of her books, especially The Red
House. She and her husband entertained a large circle of friends, colleagues and
admirers at their grand "Well Hall House".
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, which had been founded by other
Fabian Society members.
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, she died in 1924 at New Romney, Kent, and was buried in the churchyard
of St Mary in the Marsh.
Nesbit published
approximately 40 books for children, including novels, collections of stories
and picture books. 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. Noël Coward was a great admirer of hers and, 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 (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 body of work that combined realistic, contemporary children in
real-world settings with magical objects - what would now be classed as
contemporary fantasy - 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.
Nesbit also wrote for
adults, including eleven novels, short stories, and four collections of horror
stories.
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