Difference between revisions of "E. Nesbit" - New World Encyclopedia

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*{{gutenberg author|id=Edith_Nesbit|name=Edith Nesbit}}. Retrieved May 31, 2008.
 
*{{gutenberg author|id=Edith_Nesbit|name=Edith Nesbit}}. Retrieved May 31, 2008.
 
*[http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?amode=start&author=Nesbit%2c%20E%2e%20 E-texts of works by E. Nesbit] (some illustrated). Retrieved May 31, 2008.
 
*[http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/search?amode=start&author=Nesbit%2c%20E%2e%20 E-texts of works by E. Nesbit] (some illustrated). Retrieved May 31, 2008.
* [http://www.hdsmag.com/contents.html "The Wouldbegoods" Summer Book Club] Online bookclub from "Halfway Down the Stairs" magazine offering activities accompanying each chapter of "The Wouldbegoods." Retrieved May 31, 2008.
 
 
*[http://librivox.org/newcatalog/search.php?title=&author=E.+Nesbit&action=Search Free audiobooks by E. Nesbit] from [http://librivox.org LibriVox]. Retrieved May 31, 2008.
 
*[http://librivox.org/newcatalog/search.php?title=&author=E.+Nesbit&action=Search Free audiobooks by E. Nesbit] from [http://librivox.org LibriVox]. Retrieved May 31, 2008.
 
*[http://homepage.ntlworld.com/forgottenfutures/nesbit/nesbit.htm  My School Days (article series by Nesbit)]. Retrieved May 31, 2008.
 
*[http://homepage.ntlworld.com/forgottenfutures/nesbit/nesbit.htm  My School Days (article series by Nesbit)]. Retrieved May 31, 2008.

Revision as of 20:42, 31 May 2008

Edith Nesbit
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Born 15 August 1858
Kennington, Surrey, England
Died 4 May 1924 (Aged 65)
New Romney, Kent, England
Occupation Writer, poet

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.

Life

Edith Nesbit was born in 1858, at 38 Lower Kennington Lane in Kennington, Surrey (now part of Greater London). Her father, John Collis Nesbit, was an agricultural chemist, who died before her fourth birthday in March of 1862. She and her family moved around constantly during Edith's childhood, due to her sister Mary's poor health. They lived in Brighton and Buckinghamshire, before staying in various French cities—Dieppe, Rouen, Paris, Tours, Poitiers, Angouleme, Bordeaux, Arcachon, Pau, Bagneres de Bigorre, and Dinan in Brittany. They also lived in Spain and Germany, before settling for three years at Halstead Hall in Halstead in northwest Kent, a location which later inspired The Railway Children (this distinction has also been claimed by the Derbyshire town of New Mills[1]). The young Nesbit was a bit of a tomboy who generally disliked the many schools she attended. Early on, though, she developed a passion for writing stories and poems, eventually having some of her verses published by age 15.

When Nesbit was 17, the family returned to London, living variously in South East London at Eltham, Lewisham, Grove Park and Lee.

At age 19, Nesbit met bank clerk Hubert Bland in 1877. On April 22, 1880, she and Bland married; she was already seven months pregnant. Soon after, Bland was stricken with smallpox, and Nesbit had to take care of both her ill husband, and eventually also their infant son Paul. As the de-facto breadwinner of the household, Nesbit relied on earnings from her writings to support the young family. Once Bland regained his health, he turned to writing as well, but as a political journalist, he never matched the success of his wife.

The marriage between Nesbit and Bland was unconventional and would today be characterized as an open marriage. Bland continued an affair with Alice Hoatson, which resulted in two children—Rosamund in 1886 and John in 1899—both of whom Nesbit raised as her own. Nesbit had three of her own children—Paul (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 both socialists, and in 1884 were among the founders of the Fabian Society, a precursor to the Labour Party. They also jointly edited the Society's journal Today, while Hoatson was the Society's assistant secretary. Nesbit was involved in many of the radical social causes of her time, with both herself and Bland participating briefly with the Social Democratic Federation, before rejecting it as too radical. Nesbit was an active lecturer and prolific writer on socialism during the 1880s. She also wrote with her husband under the name "Fabian Bland"[2], though this enterprise was stalled as her career as children's author began to thrive.

Following the success of The Treasure Seekers , Nesbit and Bland moved to Weld Hall in Eltham, Kent (now in south-east Greater London). On February 20, 1917, some three years after Bland's death, Nesbit married Thomas "the Skipper" Tucker, a ship's engineer on the Woolwich Ferry.

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. A heavy smoker, Nesbit suffered from lung cancer, and she died in 1924 at New Romney, Kent. She was buried in the churchyard of St Mary in the Marsh.

File:ENesbitGrave.jpg
E. Nesbit's grave in St Mary in the Marsh's churchyard bears a grave marker shaped like goal posts, giving both her pseudonym "E. Nesbit" and her name "Edith Bland." There is also a memorial plaque to her inside the church.

Literature

Nesbit published approximately 40 books for children, both novels and collections of stories. Collaborating with others, she published almost as many more.

Nesbit first found success with her stories about the Bastable children. The stories first appeared in the Pall Mall magazine before being reprinted in book form, as The Story of the Treasure Seekers in 1899. The instant popularity of the Bastables and their adventures spurred two sequels, The Wouldbegoods in 1901 and The New Treasure Seekers in 1904. These stories, told through the perspective of Oswald Bastable, were decidedly modern, in stark contrast to the Victorian tales typically available to children.

In 1902, Nesbit wrote her next prominent book, Five Children and It. In it, Nesbit reversed the trend of Victorian tales, which began in the real world and shifted into a magical world; here she introduced fantasy into real world London itself. This book became the first of yet another series featuring the five children—The Phoenix and the Carpet was published in 1904, followed by The Story of the Amulet in 1906. In her children’s books to date, Nesbit’s political ideologies were perhaps most present in The Story of the Amulet, in which she highlighted the deplorable conditions suffered by the poor. Later the children travel to the future, via the magical Amulet, where they glimpse Nesbit’s vision of Utopia—a clean and beautiful England, with equal opportunities for its citizens.

Nesbit followed Amulet with The Railway Children, which has enjoyed the longest-standing popularity among all her works. In The Railway Children, Nesbit moved away from the fantasy genre of her previous series and focused on realism, underscoring the problems suffered by her juvenile protagonists. The children must confront the social repercussions of having a father in prison, albeit wrongfully accused.

Legacy

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.

She also popularized an innovative style of children's fantasy that combined realistic, contemporary children in real-world settings with magical objects and adventures. 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[3] 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) ISBN 0491017944.

Notes

  1. Railway Children battle lines are drawn. Telegraph & Argus, (April 22, 2000).
  2. The Prophet's Mantle (1885), a fictional story inspired by the life of Peter Kropotkin in London.
  3. C.S. Lewis and the scholarship of imagination in E. Nesbit and Rider Haggard | Renascence | Find Articles at BNET.com

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Alison Lurie, "E. Nesbit." Writers for Children, 423-430. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988. The Scribner Writers Series.
  • Briggs, Julia. A Woman of Passion: Life of E.Nesbit, 1858-1924. Penguin Books Ltd; New Ed edition, 1989. ISBN 0140113088.

External links


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