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.
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 Edith'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, Edith 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.
Hoatson remained with them as a housekeeper and secretary and became pregnant by Bland again 13 years later. Edith again adopted Hoatson's child, John. Bland's two children by Alice Hoatson, whom Edith adopted, were Rosamund Edith Nesbit Hamilton, later Bland (1886–1950), who married Clifford Dyer Sharp on 16 October 1909, and to whom The Book of Dragons was dedicated; and John Oliver Wentworth Bland (1899–1946) to whom The House of Arden and Five Children and It were dedicated.
Nesbit's son Fabian died aged 15 after a tonsil operation. Nesbit felt guilt over this, having fed him shortly before the general anaesthetic and then leaving him unattended afterwards, not realising that he might choke to death on regurgitated food. She subsequently dedicated several books to him, including The Story of the Treasure Seekers and its sequels. Nesbit's adopted daughter Rosamund collaborated with her on Cat Tales.
Nesbit admired the artist and Marxian socialist William Morris. Nesbit and Bland dallied with the Social Democratic Federation, but found it too radical. The couple became founding members of the Fabian Society in 1884,—after which their son Fabian was named. They jointly edited its journal Today. From 1884 until the late 1890s, Nesbit and Bland co-authored adult fiction using the joint pseudonym "Fabian Bland". Nesbit was a prolific lecturer and writer on socialism in the 1880s. She was a guest speaker at the London School of Economics, which had been founded by other Fabian Society members.
Edith lived from 1899 to 1920 at Well Hall, Eltham, in south-east London, which makes fictional appearances in several of her books, such as The Red House. From 1911 she kept a second home on the Sussex Downs at Crowlink, Friston, East Sussex. She and her husband entertained many friends, colleagues and admirers at Well Hall.
On 20 February 1917, some three years after Bland died, Nesbit married Thomas "the Skipper" Tucker in Woolwich, where he was captain of the Woolwich Ferry.
Although she was the family breadwinner and has the father in The Railway Children declare that "[g]irls are just as clever as boys, and don't you forget it!", Nesbit did not champion women's rights. "She opposed the cause of women's suffrage—mainly, she claimed, because women could swing Tory, thus harming the Socialist cause."
Commenting on the 2022 reissue of The Railway Children and The House of Arden, the magazine The New Yorker says, "Both books, like much of Nesbit's work, are episodic and sometimes picaresque, shrugging off the moralizing that was native to young people’s literature of the time, in favor of privileging a child’s logic and point of view. [...] And, most crucially, both books are constructed from a blueprint that is also a kind of reënactment [sic] of the author's own childhood: an idyll torn up at its roots by the exigencies of illness, loss, and grief."
Towards the end of her life, Nesbit moved first to Crowlink, then with the Skipper to two conjoined properties which were Royal Flying Corps buildings, 'Jolly Boat' and 'Long Boat', at Jesson, St Mary's Bay, New Romney, Kent. Nesbit lived in 'Jolly Boat' and the Skipper in 'Long Boat'. Nesbit died in 'The Long Boat', in 1924, probably from lung cancer (she "smoked incessantly"), and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary in the Marsh. Her husband Thomas died at the same address on 17 May 1935. Edith's son Paul Bland was an executor of Thomas Tucker's will.
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.