Author
E. Nesbit
1858-1924
English writer and poet whose stories of realistic, present-day children, from the Bastables to the Railway Children, helped create the modern children's adventure and fantasy story.
Born Edith Nesbit.
Edith Nesbit was born on 15 August 1858 in Kennington, then in Surrey, now part of London. Her father, an agricultural chemist, died before her fourth birthday. Her sister Mary's ill health kept the family travelling for years, in England, France, Spain and Germany, and Mary died of tuberculosis in 1871. Edith and her mother settled in Kent, and the family later moved to Lewisham in south-east London.
Her first published works were poems, and she was not yet 20 when the magazine Good Words printed one in 1878. In 1880 she married Hubert Bland, a bank clerk. In 1884 the couple helped found the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation, and she lectured and wrote on socialism through the 1880s. They wrote adult fiction together as "Fabian Bland", but it was her children's books that grew in success, and she was the family breadwinner.
The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) introduced the Bastables, a middle-class family fallen on relatively hard times. Five Children and It (1902) began her Psammead series, and her fantasies placed realistic, present-day children in real-world settings with magical objects. The Railway Children (1906) was made into a film in 1970. In all she published about 40 books for children.
In 1917, some three years after Bland's death, she married Thomas Tucker, captain of the Woolwich Ferry. She died at St Mary's Bay in Kent in 1924. Her biographer Julia Briggs called her "the first modern writer for children", and her work influenced later writers including P. L. Travers and J. K. Rowling.
Sources: wikipedia.org
