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The Life and Loves of Edith Nesbit: Victorian Iconoclast, Children's Author, and Creator of The Railway Children
Edith Nesbit (1858 – 1924) is considered the first modern writer for children and the inventor of the children’s adventure story. Author of over forty books, including her seminal classic The Railway Children, and other novels, story collections, and picture books combining real-world adventure with elements of fantasy, she has influenced such writers as C. S. Lewis, P. L. Travers, J. K. Rowling, and Jacqueline Wilson.In the illuminating The Life and Loves of Edith Nesbit, biographer Eleanor Fitzsimons moves beyond Nesbit’s publishing legacy to uncover the little-known details of the life of one of the world’s most beloved children’s authors. Playful, contradictory, and creative, Nesbit was described by George Bernard Shaw―one of her several lovers―as “audaciously unconventional”; Fitzsimons presents in The Life and Loves of Edith Nesbit this side of the literary figure, introducing readers to the Fabian Society co-founder and fabulous socialite and who hosted legendary parties and had admirers by the dozen. She also examines the elements of Nesbit’s life that influenced her fiction. For example, Nesbit’s nomadic childhood and vivid imagination conjured up phobias that lasted into adulthood, so she wrote stories to overcome her nightmares with characters inspired by family, friends, and events from her life, even writing herself as twins; a fascinating device further explored in this enlightening new book on her life.Through Nesbit’s letters and deep archival research, Fitzsimons reveals "E." to have been a prolific lecturer and writer on socialism. Nesbit railed against inequity, social injustice, and state-sponsored oppression, and she incorporated these avant-garde ideas into her writing, influencing a generation of children―an aspect of her literary legacy examined here for the first time. Fitzsimons’s riveting biography brings new light to the life and works of this famed literary icon, in whom pragmatism and idealism, tradition and modernity worked side-by-side to create a remarkable writer and woman.
400 pages, Hardcover
First published September 3, 2019
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1605 people want to read
About the author
Eleanor Fitzsimons
5 books52 followersI am a researcher and writer who specialises in writing about historical and current feminist issues. I have an MA in Women, Gender and Society from University College Dublin. My work has been published in a range of newspapers and journals including The Sunday Times, The Guardian, History Today and The Irish Times, and I am a regular radio and television contributor. My book Wilde’s Women was published by Duckworth Overlook in October 2015. My new biography, The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit, was published in October 2019.
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May 28, 2019I love the work of E. Nesbit and was very interested to learn more about her VERY colorful life.
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December 4, 2019Opening on the young Edith having the wind put up her by the mummies of Bordeaux, it's clear from the off that this will be no misty celebration of a much-loved children's author. Yes, the rural idyll is here, manifest both in the ones she experienced as a child herself and those she'd try to create for her own brood. But most writers who create paradises are reacting against experiences as much as they're recreating others, so we see also the hatred of school, and of change; the never quite forgotten loss of favourite friends and toys; the early bereavements. She lost her father early; he was a scientist whose own father had been a rather Gradgrindian-sounding educator, who disapproved of novels and Darwin both. Also a brother, who despite inventing the flower-dyeing process which enabled Wilde et al to wear their green carnations, spent a period in the workhouse before his premature demise; and a sister. The father and the sister, incidentally, both being buried very near me in the never quite fashionable catacombs of West Norwood (disappointingly, though Fitzsimons generally has an eye for the curious detail even where it's not strictly relevant, she does not mention the best feature of these, the hydraulic catafalque). This was one of several details that helped further invest me in the story – Devonshire Square, where I often sit at lunch, makes a brief appearance, and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs past which I commute turn out to have been a big influence on Nesbit.
The biggest presence in her life, though – and in some ways just as prehistoric a figure – is her terrible husband, Hubert Bland, one of those socialists with suspiciously convenient principles when it came to things like gender essentialism. Up for doing away with all obstacles to his being able to get his end away with all and sundry, yet convinced that women were at some fundamental level more suited to home and hearth, he is the archetype of every dreadful boyfriend of a far smarter, better-looking and generally just preferable female friend that you've ever met. Still, particularly in light of that abysmal recent attempt at a War Of The Worlds adaptation, smothered in half-understood approximations of sexual morality from Ye Olden Days, it's fascinating to compare and contrast the real thing, where a woman getting married seven months pregnant might mean a small-scale ceremony but was certainly no obstacle to a woman becoming a beloved children's author. Not that she was only that, of course; she saw herself first and foremost as a poet, though even for the late Victorians that didn't pay the bills, and just as MR James wrote a charming magical story for children which is now mostly forgotten, so Nesbit wrote her chilling horror stories too. On which this account does not stint, or at least no more than on the work in general, which very much takes a back seat to the title's life and loves, and when it does pop up tends to be read as veiled or reworked autobiography - as indeed does the work of those who knew the Blands, for instance Wells' New Machiavelli.
Wells is one of many literary figures to pop up in these pages, and plays a more central role than most – he would later describe the whole Bland menage as messy bitches who live for the drama (OK, I paraphrase, but barely), though his account may be coloured by their foiling his attempt to abscond with one of the daughters. On the other hand, he suggested that Hubert's lusts extended even to said daughter and he was rescuing her, so all one can safely conclude is: men! Certainly Hubert would later address a profoundly creepy book of his incredible thoughts to said daughter, advising her among other gems never to interrupt a man who was explaining something to her, even if she already knew it, because it would make her less attractive. Thanks, Hubert. Thubert. This is not the only time that sheer exasperation at Hubert Bland brings the story a curiously topical tone: when Edith, propelled largely by Hubert's predictably strong views on the matter, goes down like a lead balloon after doing a speech on why women shouldn't get the vote, one member of the audience explains that it was never going to go over well with a crowd of "waked-up" people. How little the terminology changes! And of course it's precisely Nesbit's own achievements, not to mention her own sizeable brood, that give the lie to the piffle she spouted in that speech, her notion that intellectual achievement in women led to 'sterility and race-death'.
It was that stance which would lead her to fall out with her old friend Laurence Housman, brother of AE, the latter making a brief cameo as Eeyore when he turns down a commission: "I suppose she already knows that I am morose and unamiable, and will not experience any sudden or agonising shock." AC Benson is another 'brother of the more famous' who keeps popping up, and the Chestertons are here too. More niche figures – though exciting ones for me – include Lord and Lady Dunsany (great enthusiasts for charades, apparently) and the ludicrous (and appallingly verminous) Fr. Rolfe. Wallis Budge advised her on Egyptian magic for The Story of the Amulet, and maybe more than that (though here as elsewhere, Fitzsimons hesitates to make a definite judgment on how far Nesbit's own extramarital flirtations went), and even in the diminished circumstances of her later life, her company was sought by Noel Coward, a fan of her work from infancy to his deathbed. She was there for the foundation of the Fabians, and indeed before it; it's somehow at once depressing and heartening to know that the left was just as prone to splittism and purity tests 140 years ago as today, and that despite this it has occasionally managed to get things done. I loved the line from their early manifesto stating "That the established Government has no more right to call itself the State than the smoke of London has to call itself the Weather". It was in these circles that Nesbit met George Bernard Shaw, with whom she also had some manner of inconclusive dalliance; odd outfit aside, he comes across here much as he did in The Mary Whitehouse Experience. Though in his defence, he did have the sense to point out - by analogy with his own background - how ludicrous were the snobbish assumptions underlying Nesbit's Baconian phase (and it didn't help that she'd got into her head that it could all be proved by logarithms, despite being so mathematically inept that at one point her big theory was relying on 41 being 4 x 13). William Morris was also an associate, though one who seems to have seen through Hubert better than most, and would doubtless have sympathised with Edith's observation that "It is curious that nearly all fortunes are made by turning beautiful things into ugly ones. Making beauty out of ugliness is very ill-paid work."
Nesbit's fortune wouldn't last, and in her lifetime at least her fame would also decline, but it's noticeable that even as her lot improved, her principles never faltered. I particularly liked the story of how the family would put on an entertainment for the poor children from a local school, but were outraged after the first one when they found out it had been used a prize for good behaviour, and thereafter insisted that all the children should come, not just those accounted virtuous by the staff, who tended to be the same sort of child Nesbit herself found a little wet. But against that, and her tendency to drop anti-capitalist propaganda into her stories, one must set her dislike for artists' renditions of her child characters which made them look like they might not be "children of gentle folk". As one friend summarised her: "She was a wonderful woman, large hearted, amazingly unconventional but with sudden strange reversions to ultra-respectable standards." But we have all our contradictions, and there are quotes from Nesbit's writing on the desperate shortages in poor schools, the joyless grind of their curriculum, which not so long ago one might have looked at and thought how far we'd come. Would that we could feel that way still, instead of looking longingly at her poem Two Voices:
"This is our vengeance day.
Our masters made fat with our fasting,
Shall fall before us like corn
When the sickle for harvest is strong."
As tends to be the way with biographies, the final chapters are a sad read, though there are some very moving passages about her second marriage, which she described as "a consolation prize for all sorts of failures" but which reads as a far better deal than the first. Still, the book ends on a lovely passage about the people who remain children at heart, which is too long to quote in full, too beautiful to abbreviate, but perfectly sums up the charm of her greatest books. Would I have liked a little more on Psammeads and Bastables? Perhaps, but I can always revisit them anyway, in their own stories, and this way I definitely have more of a picture of the fascinating, vexing milieu from which they sprang.
(Netgalley ARC)
The biggest presence in her life, though – and in some ways just as prehistoric a figure – is her terrible husband, Hubert Bland, one of those socialists with suspiciously convenient principles when it came to things like gender essentialism. Up for doing away with all obstacles to his being able to get his end away with all and sundry, yet convinced that women were at some fundamental level more suited to home and hearth, he is the archetype of every dreadful boyfriend of a far smarter, better-looking and generally just preferable female friend that you've ever met. Still, particularly in light of that abysmal recent attempt at a War Of The Worlds adaptation, smothered in half-understood approximations of sexual morality from Ye Olden Days, it's fascinating to compare and contrast the real thing, where a woman getting married seven months pregnant might mean a small-scale ceremony but was certainly no obstacle to a woman becoming a beloved children's author. Not that she was only that, of course; she saw herself first and foremost as a poet, though even for the late Victorians that didn't pay the bills, and just as MR James wrote a charming magical story for children which is now mostly forgotten, so Nesbit wrote her chilling horror stories too. On which this account does not stint, or at least no more than on the work in general, which very much takes a back seat to the title's life and loves, and when it does pop up tends to be read as veiled or reworked autobiography - as indeed does the work of those who knew the Blands, for instance Wells' New Machiavelli.
Wells is one of many literary figures to pop up in these pages, and plays a more central role than most – he would later describe the whole Bland menage as messy bitches who live for the drama (OK, I paraphrase, but barely), though his account may be coloured by their foiling his attempt to abscond with one of the daughters. On the other hand, he suggested that Hubert's lusts extended even to said daughter and he was rescuing her, so all one can safely conclude is: men! Certainly Hubert would later address a profoundly creepy book of his incredible thoughts to said daughter, advising her among other gems never to interrupt a man who was explaining something to her, even if she already knew it, because it would make her less attractive. Thanks, Hubert. Thubert. This is not the only time that sheer exasperation at Hubert Bland brings the story a curiously topical tone: when Edith, propelled largely by Hubert's predictably strong views on the matter, goes down like a lead balloon after doing a speech on why women shouldn't get the vote, one member of the audience explains that it was never going to go over well with a crowd of "waked-up" people. How little the terminology changes! And of course it's precisely Nesbit's own achievements, not to mention her own sizeable brood, that give the lie to the piffle she spouted in that speech, her notion that intellectual achievement in women led to 'sterility and race-death'.
It was that stance which would lead her to fall out with her old friend Laurence Housman, brother of AE, the latter making a brief cameo as Eeyore when he turns down a commission: "I suppose she already knows that I am morose and unamiable, and will not experience any sudden or agonising shock." AC Benson is another 'brother of the more famous' who keeps popping up, and the Chestertons are here too. More niche figures – though exciting ones for me – include Lord and Lady Dunsany (great enthusiasts for charades, apparently) and the ludicrous (and appallingly verminous) Fr. Rolfe. Wallis Budge advised her on Egyptian magic for The Story of the Amulet, and maybe more than that (though here as elsewhere, Fitzsimons hesitates to make a definite judgment on how far Nesbit's own extramarital flirtations went), and even in the diminished circumstances of her later life, her company was sought by Noel Coward, a fan of her work from infancy to his deathbed. She was there for the foundation of the Fabians, and indeed before it; it's somehow at once depressing and heartening to know that the left was just as prone to splittism and purity tests 140 years ago as today, and that despite this it has occasionally managed to get things done. I loved the line from their early manifesto stating "That the established Government has no more right to call itself the State than the smoke of London has to call itself the Weather". It was in these circles that Nesbit met George Bernard Shaw, with whom she also had some manner of inconclusive dalliance; odd outfit aside, he comes across here much as he did in The Mary Whitehouse Experience. Though in his defence, he did have the sense to point out - by analogy with his own background - how ludicrous were the snobbish assumptions underlying Nesbit's Baconian phase (and it didn't help that she'd got into her head that it could all be proved by logarithms, despite being so mathematically inept that at one point her big theory was relying on 41 being 4 x 13). William Morris was also an associate, though one who seems to have seen through Hubert better than most, and would doubtless have sympathised with Edith's observation that "It is curious that nearly all fortunes are made by turning beautiful things into ugly ones. Making beauty out of ugliness is very ill-paid work."
Nesbit's fortune wouldn't last, and in her lifetime at least her fame would also decline, but it's noticeable that even as her lot improved, her principles never faltered. I particularly liked the story of how the family would put on an entertainment for the poor children from a local school, but were outraged after the first one when they found out it had been used a prize for good behaviour, and thereafter insisted that all the children should come, not just those accounted virtuous by the staff, who tended to be the same sort of child Nesbit herself found a little wet. But against that, and her tendency to drop anti-capitalist propaganda into her stories, one must set her dislike for artists' renditions of her child characters which made them look like they might not be "children of gentle folk". As one friend summarised her: "She was a wonderful woman, large hearted, amazingly unconventional but with sudden strange reversions to ultra-respectable standards." But we have all our contradictions, and there are quotes from Nesbit's writing on the desperate shortages in poor schools, the joyless grind of their curriculum, which not so long ago one might have looked at and thought how far we'd come. Would that we could feel that way still, instead of looking longingly at her poem Two Voices:
"This is our vengeance day.
Our masters made fat with our fasting,
Shall fall before us like corn
When the sickle for harvest is strong."
As tends to be the way with biographies, the final chapters are a sad read, though there are some very moving passages about her second marriage, which she described as "a consolation prize for all sorts of failures" but which reads as a far better deal than the first. Still, the book ends on a lovely passage about the people who remain children at heart, which is too long to quote in full, too beautiful to abbreviate, but perfectly sums up the charm of her greatest books. Would I have liked a little more on Psammeads and Bastables? Perhaps, but I can always revisit them anyway, in their own stories, and this way I definitely have more of a picture of the fascinating, vexing milieu from which they sprang.
(Netgalley ARC)
October 17, 2019
Compelling, well-researched, deeply thought-provoking and incredibly surprising; you will not be let down by this biography of one of the most fascinating figures in childrens' literature. Not only does it lay bare her life for examination, it opens her mind and her heart and gives greater understanding of her writing.
March 2, 2024
There is only one way [to understand children]: to remember what you thought and felt and liked and hated when you yourself were a child. [...] There is no other way.
Daisy Nesbit, Edith Bland and Mrs Tommy Tucker: just three of the many sides to one extraordinary character. One a fearful yet imaginative child, deprived of a father at an early age, shifting from pillar to post, to and fro across the English Channel; the second a dedicated socialist married to a prodigious womaniser, soon to become a successful writer of children's fiction and friend to established and aspiring literati; the last a widow, remarrying for love but plagued by health issues, finally buried in a Kentish churchyard on Romney Marsh.
Edith Nesbit's singular life -- spanning over six decades, encompassing the late Victorian and Edwardian periods and witnessing momentous movements and events -- is fully documented in this new Nesbit biography, the second in as many years, complete with references, a detailed index and a selection of some dozen images.
Exceedingly well researched, The Life and Loves of E Nesbit largely lets contemporary documents speak for themselves so that the reader may hear authentic voices and individual opinions, both so important in gauging the impact this woman had on those who met her, knew her, and read her.
Eleanor Fitzsimons has done Nesbit's personality and legacy proud. Twenty-two chapters, headed with suitable contemporary quotes, chart her life in roughly chronological order. Beginning with the trauma she suffered seeing the Vault of Mummies in Bordeaux (as recounted in Long Ago When I Was Young ), the text takes us through her family background and early years, times when she attended a variety of schools or relocated to France with her mother for the sake of her sister's health. We then hear of her marriage to Hubert Bland and of their shared interests in poetry, stories and socialism.
That social concern lead to the couple being instrumental in the setting up of the Fabian Society, attracting a host of luminaries on the left of political life, notably George Bernard Shaw and H G Wells among others. At the moated Well Hall in Eltham, South London, and in the Kent marshes at Dymchurch she held court to friends, family, protégés and paying guests ('PGs'), organised fundraisers and devised entertainments for disadvantaged children and their families, was active in the proceedings of the Fabians, and put the grounds of Well Hall to good use for fun and recreation, for fêtes, and, around the time of the Great War, for dairy produce, flowers and fruit.
Above all she wrote: reams of poetry, her first love; plays for charity as well as the theatre; tales of terror, inspired by her early trauma and lively imagination; adult novels, often in collaboration with Hubert or a young protégé; political tracts, articles and correspondence to the papers; and of course, increasingly, the children's fiction for which she is largely, and rightly, remembered.
And, all around her, her extended family, from which came both happiness and tragedy. Her philandering husband who loved too much, even fathering two children by Alice Hoatson whom Edith brought up as her own; the death of their young son Fabian, from which she never quite recovered; her falling out with prominent Fabians over matters like women's suffrage (which, as a putative feminist, she uncharacteristically opposed); the dwindling popularity of her adult fiction which let her to greater financial straits; and finally the death of her first mainstay Hubert even as her own health and strength was failing. But there were fun times too, with parties and charades and seaside holidays.
With her bohemian life and appearance -- a loose-flowing Liberty dress, jangling bangles up to her elbows, and an ever-present lit cigarette in a long holder -- her unconventional approach stemmed not from a desire to outrage but from a deep-seated concern for those less fortunate than herself, combined with a sense of a magical world just beyond one's grasp. She was forever badgering people for story plots, which she then wove into an imaginative narrative full of novel insights with not a little dash of what we might now call autobiografiction.
What made her writing for young readers different from the stock moralistic fodder of the time? Edith herself declared that she was among those who "feel to the end that they are children in a grown-up world". In the biography's final pages Fitzsimons quotes extensively from Wings and the Child -- correctly, in my opinion -- with Edith writing that she was one of those who
just mingle with the other people, looking as grown-up as any one -- but in their hearts they are only pretending to be grown-up: it is like acting in a charade. [...] And deep in their hearts is the faith and the hope that in the life to come it may not be necessary to pretend to be grown-up.
In these final, beautifully expressed paragraphs I must confess I shed a little tear -- for Edith, for myself, and for all the children "disguised by grown-up bodies". For a few authors like her the ability to write for children in their language, about their concerns, allows these disguised children to let their façades slip so that they can be recognised for what they truly are.
For such a detailed book I spotted relatively few typos -- 1889 for 1898 at one point, for example, or 'Pavlova' misspelled (though corrected in the US edition). The indexing was meticulous (even a brief reference in the endnotes usually merits an entry) though I was surprised the seemingly self-effacing Alice Hoatson wasn't given an entry in her own right, being included only under Edith's entry; also under this entry were listed 'major and significant works' in place of a separate select bibliography.
What I missed though was a timeline of principal events in her life and, though I suppose the chapters provided a sufficient chronological outline, I'm probably being greedy in wanting it all.
But these are all trifling quibbles: the author is to be hugely congratulated for such a meticulous and microscopic picture of a wonderfully contradictory yet admirable woman. Do I detect, under Fitzsimons' relatively dispassionate account, someone very much in sympathy with her subject?
* * * * *
Here are links to my reviews of some of Nesbit's children's books:
Long Ago When I Was Young is a series of vignettes of her early childhood.
The Story of the Treasure Seekers , The Wouldbegood s, and The New Treasure Seekers all concern the Bastable children and their friends.
A collection of short stories entitled The Magic World along with The Enchanted Castle are a mix of fairytale and fantasy.
Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet are the first two titles in the Psammead series, followed by The Story of the Amulet.
November 12, 2020
Like many other readers, I came to this book because Edith Nesbit's stories for children played such an important role in my childhood. I hope the passage of time does not make these books too inaccessible to future generations, because they are set in a world that has disappeared, a world of pinafores and treacle and hat pins and ginger beer in stone pottery crocks, and children roaming freely around the countryside unaccompanied by grown-ups. JK Rowling acknowledges her debt to Edith Nesbit. If you've read Rowling and not Nesbit, Nesbit's stories feature groups of brothers and sisters who set out for the day after begging some sandwiches wrapped up in wax paper from the servant, who is grouchy and reminds them to be home for tea, mind, and don't tear your stockings, and then the children go off to have adventures and face horrible perils in a magic world without adults.
I had been vaguely aware that Nesbit wrote for a living because she had children to support, but I was not aware of her unconventional marriage; all the more surprising because it began in Victorian times. Her husband was a strong personality (ironically his name was Bland) and a talented writer but unable to support the family. He was also a compulsive womanizer. Since Nesbit had committed herself to revolutionary politics and progressive notions, she had no grounds to object when her husband's lover joined the family and bore two children who Nesbit raised and supported along with her own. The situation was not so much New Age as reminiscent of an old Chinese household with a primary and secondary wife. It seems that Nesbit was in many ways the head of the household, however. Fitzsimmons writes that Nesbit saw a big old house she liked, leased it and moved to it, and makes no reference to the husband, which suggests that it was all her decision.
Edith stayed married to the philandering Mr. Bland until his death, then found happiness in a second marriage. There is a poignant quote in which she tells a friend, "For the first time in my life, I know what it is to have a man's whole heart."
But Fitzsimmons does not pause there to editorialize on the point, on the wonder of finding emotional security after years of a domestic life marked by raised voices and slammed doors and resentment. She moves on without comment. She also does not editorialize when she tells us that Alice Hoatson, the "second wife," after years of serving as Mr. Bland's secretary and nurse, moved out after his death like a cast-off maiden aunt. We are told, without elaboration, that she always referred to her own two children as her "niece and nephew," and she died in poverty. We do learn what many people who knew Nesbit and her husband thought of them, and in fact many people were guests in their house because the Blands were very hospitable. Nesbit filled her house with company, corresponded with many people, mentored many young writers (particularly young men), and did a lot of charity work, all while turning out massive amounts of writing.
I felt the entire book could do with more narrative voice, more speculation, and fewer quotes and excerpts. I wish the author could have trusted her ability to summarize and interpret more. It did feel at times as though Fitzsimmons wanted to use every piece of research she turned up, including the fact that the mother of a passing acquaintance was related to Sir Richard Burton, the explorer. At other times, more emphasis to point out key figures is warranted. A female author who moved in to the household in Nesbit's declining years is given no introduction. Sometimes names are mentioned in passing, then mentioned again in the next chapter, and I had to resort to the index several times to go back and remember who they were. The more famous characters, such as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells are colorfully drawn and well-quoted, though, particularly the postcard from Shaw when he tries to tease Nesbitt out of her "Shakespeare's plays were written by Sir Francis Bacon" obsession.
The Fabian Society played a large role in Edith Nesbit's story, and I think more space could have been given over to the history and significant influence of the Fabians for the sake of readers who had never heard of them. They come across as a group of insular, self-important progressives and writers who gave speeches about the great socialist utopia of the future, while squabbling, having extramarital affairs and getting revenge by putting each other, thinly disguised, in their novels and short stories. The society still exists, maybe that's what they're still up to today.
Fitzsimmons uncovers how often Nesbit used her own life experiences in her adult novels, short stories and poetry as well as her (more popular and successful) children's stories. The pain and consequences of infidelity crop up more than once, for example.
Nesbit had money worries most of her life, but this was partly owing to her own impulsive generosity and also, it was that kind of unique Edwardian poverty which consists of having several servants, being able to leave the children with the nursemaid for the day so you can go for lunch and walk about with a friend, and spend every summer in a cottage by the sea. At one point she had two homes. But she also sold flowers from her garden and raised chickens to sell eggs when her writing career declined.
Nesbit would have fit in beautifully with a Unitarian church congregation of the 1960's and 70's with her confident air, her emotional, temperamental nature, her acceptance of open marriage, her caftan-like tea gowns and her jangling jewelry. I think people still smoked indoors at Unitarian gatherings fifty years ago, and she was a heavy smoker, an emancipated and defiant habit which killed her at age 65. One could see her in such a gathering, holding forth on the Vietnam War and Nixon. Or maybe she has more affinity with a woman who died 7 years before Nesbit was born--Mary Shelley, a writer of talent who accepted all the pain and betrayal that went along with being married to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Nesbit evidently felt the bargain she'd made was worth it.
The Life and Loves of Edith Nesbit is a thoroughly researched and thought-provoking portrait of a fascinating woman who touched many people's lives. My favourite part was the first section, which described Nesbit's unusual childhood. Her family's travels, the places she lived, the separation and loss she suffered, made her into the outstanding children's author she was. Is.
I had been vaguely aware that Nesbit wrote for a living because she had children to support, but I was not aware of her unconventional marriage; all the more surprising because it began in Victorian times. Her husband was a strong personality (ironically his name was Bland) and a talented writer but unable to support the family. He was also a compulsive womanizer. Since Nesbit had committed herself to revolutionary politics and progressive notions, she had no grounds to object when her husband's lover joined the family and bore two children who Nesbit raised and supported along with her own. The situation was not so much New Age as reminiscent of an old Chinese household with a primary and secondary wife. It seems that Nesbit was in many ways the head of the household, however. Fitzsimmons writes that Nesbit saw a big old house she liked, leased it and moved to it, and makes no reference to the husband, which suggests that it was all her decision.
Edith stayed married to the philandering Mr. Bland until his death, then found happiness in a second marriage. There is a poignant quote in which she tells a friend, "For the first time in my life, I know what it is to have a man's whole heart."
But Fitzsimmons does not pause there to editorialize on the point, on the wonder of finding emotional security after years of a domestic life marked by raised voices and slammed doors and resentment. She moves on without comment. She also does not editorialize when she tells us that Alice Hoatson, the "second wife," after years of serving as Mr. Bland's secretary and nurse, moved out after his death like a cast-off maiden aunt. We are told, without elaboration, that she always referred to her own two children as her "niece and nephew," and she died in poverty. We do learn what many people who knew Nesbit and her husband thought of them, and in fact many people were guests in their house because the Blands were very hospitable. Nesbit filled her house with company, corresponded with many people, mentored many young writers (particularly young men), and did a lot of charity work, all while turning out massive amounts of writing.
I felt the entire book could do with more narrative voice, more speculation, and fewer quotes and excerpts. I wish the author could have trusted her ability to summarize and interpret more. It did feel at times as though Fitzsimmons wanted to use every piece of research she turned up, including the fact that the mother of a passing acquaintance was related to Sir Richard Burton, the explorer. At other times, more emphasis to point out key figures is warranted. A female author who moved in to the household in Nesbit's declining years is given no introduction. Sometimes names are mentioned in passing, then mentioned again in the next chapter, and I had to resort to the index several times to go back and remember who they were. The more famous characters, such as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells are colorfully drawn and well-quoted, though, particularly the postcard from Shaw when he tries to tease Nesbitt out of her "Shakespeare's plays were written by Sir Francis Bacon" obsession.
The Fabian Society played a large role in Edith Nesbit's story, and I think more space could have been given over to the history and significant influence of the Fabians for the sake of readers who had never heard of them. They come across as a group of insular, self-important progressives and writers who gave speeches about the great socialist utopia of the future, while squabbling, having extramarital affairs and getting revenge by putting each other, thinly disguised, in their novels and short stories. The society still exists, maybe that's what they're still up to today.
Fitzsimmons uncovers how often Nesbit used her own life experiences in her adult novels, short stories and poetry as well as her (more popular and successful) children's stories. The pain and consequences of infidelity crop up more than once, for example.
Nesbit had money worries most of her life, but this was partly owing to her own impulsive generosity and also, it was that kind of unique Edwardian poverty which consists of having several servants, being able to leave the children with the nursemaid for the day so you can go for lunch and walk about with a friend, and spend every summer in a cottage by the sea. At one point she had two homes. But she also sold flowers from her garden and raised chickens to sell eggs when her writing career declined.
Nesbit would have fit in beautifully with a Unitarian church congregation of the 1960's and 70's with her confident air, her emotional, temperamental nature, her acceptance of open marriage, her caftan-like tea gowns and her jangling jewelry. I think people still smoked indoors at Unitarian gatherings fifty years ago, and she was a heavy smoker, an emancipated and defiant habit which killed her at age 65. One could see her in such a gathering, holding forth on the Vietnam War and Nixon. Or maybe she has more affinity with a woman who died 7 years before Nesbit was born--Mary Shelley, a writer of talent who accepted all the pain and betrayal that went along with being married to Percy Bysshe Shelley. Nesbit evidently felt the bargain she'd made was worth it.
The Life and Loves of Edith Nesbit is a thoroughly researched and thought-provoking portrait of a fascinating woman who touched many people's lives. My favourite part was the first section, which described Nesbit's unusual childhood. Her family's travels, the places she lived, the separation and loss she suffered, made her into the outstanding children's author she was. Is.
July 3, 2022
Having read a number of Nesbit’s short Gothic stories while being aware that she was such a prolific children’s writer I was interested to learn more about her life to better understand her varied literary output. As I suspected, it seems that most of the variety in her work was a result of financial need.
While I found this a relatively engaging biography, I did find the text included far too many repetitive quotations. It got to the point where if I’d read one more account of someone mentioning her bangles and cigarette holder I could have quite happily dropped this book into my mop bucket. I also found Fitzsimon’s overuse of source material problematic when passages from Nesbit’s books were used as evidence of places she’d been and things she’d seen.
Passages about the Fabian Society and all the spats and friendships with other authors were really interesting. I’d of preferred more of this, with added historical and fin-de-sieclè contextualisation, rather than the huge chunks of quotations from her children’s stories.
While I found this a relatively engaging biography, I did find the text included far too many repetitive quotations. It got to the point where if I’d read one more account of someone mentioning her bangles and cigarette holder I could have quite happily dropped this book into my mop bucket. I also found Fitzsimon’s overuse of source material problematic when passages from Nesbit’s books were used as evidence of places she’d been and things she’d seen.
Passages about the Fabian Society and all the spats and friendships with other authors were really interesting. I’d of preferred more of this, with added historical and fin-de-sieclè contextualisation, rather than the huge chunks of quotations from her children’s stories.
February 5, 2020
read and loved her books as a kid, had no idea how unconventional her personal life was. despite that, she had a traditionalist view of what a woman's role should be, perhaps colored by her husband.
February 17, 2020
Was it really only 19 days ago? It seems a century! While I was interested in knowing more about E. Nesbit, I wasn’t interested in having all my illusions shattered! I suppose that the best summary of Edith’s life is to say that she truly was a child and that was both her gift and her curse. Her ability to see always from a child’s perspective meant that children loved her stories. Friends and strangers flocked to her light-hearted, culture-rich (in the best way) gatherings. Her heart moved her to give to those around her who were in need. She reached out without counting the cost. But it had its cost in the precarious financial situation of her family and the unhappy lives of some of her children.
This book’s author, Eleanor Fitzsimons, knows how to conjure up a scene. She vividly describes Edith’s face, hair, general appearance, clothes, and constant smoking (including an exaggeratedly long cigarette holder) - I really could see her! I also could see the chaos of their lifestyle at Well Hall. She quotes from Edith’s own writing to lament the blight of urbanization. (I feel the same way about the creep of Route 50 out towards the British Pantry at Gilbert’s Corner. It is an insidious caterpillar - better said, a slug - oozing over the landscape.) In fact, she chooses many apt excerpts from Edith’s writing and that of others, so perhaps her real gift is in spotting the best description on which to draw. She very much provided what was advertised, the citations of Edith’s socialist views in her stories. I would have liked a more organized presentation of that information, however, as opposed to having examples thrown casually into the middle of other parts of the text. Until I went back and looked at the Goodreads summary of the book, I’d forgotten that that was supposed to be the highlight of the biography. Just goes to show!
Overall, Fitzsimons writes in a slightly confusing style. She frequently dives off on side roads to describe people who have barely touched some part of the story. She gives tiny life sketches of authors that have briefly inserted themselves into the action. She cites work by still other authors in a manner that makes the assumption that we’ve read whatever book or article is in question. Until I read this biography, I didn’t know that Edith had written so extensively for adults. Apparently those pieces didn’t have the staying power of her children’s literature.
On several occasions Fitzsimons mentioned the weight that she felt in having to follow earlier lauded Nesbit biographers. I got the definite impression that she was working overtime to make her book different from those others. Some of the “local color” might have been part of that effort. Or perhaps it was intended to be the focus on the socialist lessons of Mrs. Tiggeywinkel?
Anyone who looks at my list of reviews knows that I am quite happy to tackle a lengthy work. What I demand is a thesis. Sadly, I’m not sure Fitzsimons had one, even in this much shorter volume. I am glad to have read this book, but I also will be glad to drop it in the return slot at the library!
This book’s author, Eleanor Fitzsimons, knows how to conjure up a scene. She vividly describes Edith’s face, hair, general appearance, clothes, and constant smoking (including an exaggeratedly long cigarette holder) - I really could see her! I also could see the chaos of their lifestyle at Well Hall. She quotes from Edith’s own writing to lament the blight of urbanization. (I feel the same way about the creep of Route 50 out towards the British Pantry at Gilbert’s Corner. It is an insidious caterpillar - better said, a slug - oozing over the landscape.) In fact, she chooses many apt excerpts from Edith’s writing and that of others, so perhaps her real gift is in spotting the best description on which to draw. She very much provided what was advertised, the citations of Edith’s socialist views in her stories. I would have liked a more organized presentation of that information, however, as opposed to having examples thrown casually into the middle of other parts of the text. Until I went back and looked at the Goodreads summary of the book, I’d forgotten that that was supposed to be the highlight of the biography. Just goes to show!
Overall, Fitzsimons writes in a slightly confusing style. She frequently dives off on side roads to describe people who have barely touched some part of the story. She gives tiny life sketches of authors that have briefly inserted themselves into the action. She cites work by still other authors in a manner that makes the assumption that we’ve read whatever book or article is in question. Until I read this biography, I didn’t know that Edith had written so extensively for adults. Apparently those pieces didn’t have the staying power of her children’s literature.
On several occasions Fitzsimons mentioned the weight that she felt in having to follow earlier lauded Nesbit biographers. I got the definite impression that she was working overtime to make her book different from those others. Some of the “local color” might have been part of that effort. Or perhaps it was intended to be the focus on the socialist lessons of Mrs. Tiggeywinkel?
Anyone who looks at my list of reviews knows that I am quite happy to tackle a lengthy work. What I demand is a thesis. Sadly, I’m not sure Fitzsimons had one, even in this much shorter volume. I am glad to have read this book, but I also will be glad to drop it in the return slot at the library!
November 1, 2019
Oh, I just loved this. Biographies about writers are possibly my favourite type of read. I confess that I have never read Nesbitt but this wonderfully researched biography is sending me out to buy her books. What a woman, way ahead of her time. I was fascinated by her discipline and philosophy about life. And I was awed by her output and the financial independence she forged for herself and how she chose to spend that money. And she never stopped being curious about the world. As a children's writer, I will reread again and again the last page of this book where Nesbitt accidentally provides a summary of how to understand children and what makes good writing for young readers. Honestly, I didn't want this book to end but I had to keep turning the pages!
December 13, 2021
https://girlwithherheadinabook.co.uk/...
Edith Nesbit is one of those figures from history that has always intrigued me. As a child, I was lent an old copy of a Girl's Own magazine which featured a story of hers describing part of her childhood spent away from her family in France. Later, I happened to read that she was seven months pregnant on her wedding day. Somewhere else, I picked up that she was a Socialist. About a decade ago, I also read The Children's Book which was heavily inspired by her family life. So I felt that I half knew her but the glimpses that I had caught were both contradictory and compelling. How did she end up bringing up the two children that her husband fathered with his secretary? How did she become both the bread-winner for her family and also gain a reputation as a rabid anti-feminist? So many questions. Seeing a biography with a title like The Life and Loves of Edith Nesbit, I naturally dived right in.
Fitzsimons makes it clear from the beginning that this is not going to be a sentimental memoir of the life of a beloved children's novelist. The book opens with a description of the young Edith visiting the mummies in the Saint-Michel tower in Bordeaux, coming away utterly terrified. Fitzsimons marks this as a key moment in Nesbit's psychology but it was just one of a number of privations and tribulations which marked her childhood. Nesbit's father died before Edith turned four, she had a nomadic childhood as her mother moved the family from place to place to try and improve the health of her older sister who later died of tuberculosis. You can see how this kind of untethered upbringing left her highly vulnerable to the man who would come to overshadow her adult life, Hubert Bland.
Nesbit's husband brings to mind the opening line of C S Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 'There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it'. Indeed, given that Lewis is often seen as being influenced by Nesbit, I almost wonder if Bland was an inspiration for the Scrubb family itself. The more I read about him, the more appalled I was. Nesbit's original fiancé introduced her to Bland and she was so drawn in by his apparent charisma that she ended her relationship and thus ended up seven months pregnant on her wedding day to Bland. But even in these early days, things were not what they appeared. Nesbit lived in rented lodgings while Bland mostly resided with his mother and her paid companion, Maggie Doran. Doran was also pregnant by Bland with both women giving birth within months of each other. And here things get strange. When Edith finally discovered Bland's deception, her response was to befriend Maggie.
Bland seems like one of those ghastly men who manage to manipulate strong women. He and Nesbit were one of the founding members of the Fabian Society but Bland's socialist principles were noticeably self-serving. He was against any barriers to sex outside of marriage but also opposed to women working outside the home. Simultaneous to this, he also refused to find paid employment himself, so Nesbit became the bread-winner, variously designing greeting cards and selling short stories to magazines. Over time, Edith made close friends with a young woman called Alice Hoatson. Hoatson supported Nesbit when she suffered a stillbirth and kept her company on the nights when Bland was 'out' with Maggie. Edith was so attached to Alice that she even consulted a genealogist to see if they were somehow related, even though Alice was mousy and introverted and Edith quite the opposite. Before long, Alice moved into the family home and then even more abruptly gave birth. Edith agreed to adopt the child but it is unclear at what point she discovered that her own husband was the father.
I really struggle to identify with people with lives like these. I had similar issues when reading Amanda Foreman's biography of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. The duchess' best friend became the duke's mistress and there was even some evidence of some form of dalliance between the two women. I am an unabashed monogamist. I don't have a wandering eye. I would never flirt with someone other than my partner. So the private life of Mr and Mrs Bland seems utterly foreign to me. And for all that the biography's title was The Life and Loves of Edith Nesbit, Fitzsimons seemed remarkably incurious about trying to define it to the reader. Were they what we would now refer to as 'polyamorous'? Certainly Edith seemed to also have various 'romantic' friendships with men during the course of her marriage although Fitzsimons skips delicately over their precise nature. But there was something so pathetic in how Fitzsimons describes Nesbit chasing after George Bernard Shaw and then in Nesbit's own description of her second marriage to Tommy Tucker after Bland's death, 'For the first time in my life I know what it is to possess a man’s whole heart'. She was clearly a strong woman and there is such a tragedy there in how she did not have the love in her life that she deserved.
For all that, I found the Bland family to be rather unsavoury. This was one of those rare biographies where one comes away rather less enamoured with the subject than one was before. I was never a die-hard fan of Nesbit as a child and have even been known to muddle some of her work with that of Frances Hodgson Burnett. I read The Railway Children and Five Children and It along with its assorted sequels but gave up on The Treasure Seekers and have only found bits and pieces of her short-fiction. Still, I had believed her to be a down-to-earth writer, akin to the Mother in The Railway Children. Fitzsimons reveals her as far more mercurial. It was Hoatson who kept house and gave Nesbit the spare time to write and manage her social life. As well as managing the home, Hoatson also seems to have managed Nesbit's moods as best as she could since both Mr and Mrs Bland had a penchant for drama. It was surprising to see quite how closely The Children's Book stuck to the facts. Byatt even named the family the Wellwoods as a direct parallel to Nesbit having lived for many years in Well Hall. Another parallel between Byatt's novel and Nesbit's real life was how the lack of adult irresponsibility impacted on the younger generation.
Nesbit had three biological children as well as her two adoptive offspring via Hoatson. I had been aware that Nesbit's youngest child Fabian had died young. I had not known that he died following an operation to remove his adenoids, a procedure which the boy's parents seemed to have forgotten was taking place given that Edith had to be roused out of bed when the surgeon arrived. This oversight meant that the poor child had not been warned to fast beforehand. This omission is likely to have caused his death. Edith was 'demented by grief' but I just felt so heartbroken for that poor neglected boy. Just as awful is the sad history of Rosamund, eldest child of Hoatson. Supposedly after learning of Fabian's death, Nesbit screamed at Bland, 'Why couldn't it have been Rosamund?' And this was apparently how the poor girl learned the truth about her parentage. There is a fantastic bitchiness to Rosamund's every utterance in the biography, particularly regarding her stepmother, and yet one can see that she has plenty of grounds for resentment. She also seemed to have been groomed by the much older and married HG Wells while very young and even attempted to elope with him to Paris aged twenty. Rosamund's ultimate marriage was not a happy one and she later wrote to Wells that he was the only person to have ever loved her.
With all this in mind, it is was particularly alarming to realise that Nesbit used her own children as a template for the cast of Five Children and It. The contrast between the bucolic adventures depicted on the page and the dark domestic secrets of the Bland household is unsettling. Rosamund stated that one of the reasons that she wished to elope was to escape Hubert's 'unfatherly' attentions. I was particularly struck though by the way that Nesbit clearly doted on 'the Lamb' in Five Children and It, the youngest child. He was inspired by baby John, the 'afterthought' child and indeed Nesbit loved him in real life. Yet he was Alice Hoatson's baby and to add extra salt in the wound, he was born not long after Nesbit suffered a stillbirth during her final pregnancy. Again I cannot even begin to imagine how one mothers a baby born from the betrayal of one's spouse just after suffering such a devastating physical loss. I don't think that my own method would have been to play it all out in children's fiction however. And there is something so strange in how Hoatson continued to refer to Rosamund and John as her 'niece and nephew' even after both the Blands were dead. The past really is another country and they do things differently there.
From start to finish, the life of Edith Nesbit was far from easy. Whether she was E. Nesbit, Mrs Bland or even Mrs Tucker, money was always tight and she was always called on to be the one earning it. Nesbit's grief over Fabian's death spurred her on to the most creative period of her life but it was still her unfortunate fate to see her work fall out of fashion in her later life. The Blands clearly enjoyed company and hosting parties yet they lacked the money to do so comfortably. As the biography progressed, I could only see Hubert Bland as a parasite feeding off his wife's talents and dragging her down. He was heavily opposed to female suffrage, opining, '“Votes for Women? Votes for children! Votes for dogs!” so it is not hard to concur with Fitzsimon's theory that he was also behind Nesbit's disastrous speech on 'Natural Disabilities of Women' in front of an aghast Fabian Women's Group. I suspect that Mrs Tucker was able to recognise the many, many ways in which Mr Bland had been an appalling husband but Mrs Bland seems to have been in utter thrall to him.
I am always strangely surprised when authors are revealed as motivated by monetary rather than artistic rewards. It is as if I see the books that I love as presents rather than objects of a financial transaction. The Railway Children in particular is such a thing of beauty, particularly its stunning closing lines. Fitzsimons traces how Nesbit's life can be seen reflected in her work but it is obvious that her primary motivation was to support her family. She was no hobby writer, she wrote for survival. Never mind her husband's high-minded views on women, Nesbit was a woman who worked. Bland had Alice Hoatson to be the good little wife who kept the hearth warm. While Fitzsimons is an extremely talented writer and the biography is highly-researched and accessible, it is probably obvious by now that I found it a pretty bleak read. From the mummies in the opening chapter onwards, Nesbit endured horrors of many kinds and only seems to have found security in her marriage during her final years. Fitzsimons describes a complex, challenging and contrary women but for all her faults, I could only I wish Nesbit's soul peace. Her legacy is a rich one and how she deserves to be remembered. I look forward to when I can read The Railway Children to my own offspring.
Edith Nesbit is one of those figures from history that has always intrigued me. As a child, I was lent an old copy of a Girl's Own magazine which featured a story of hers describing part of her childhood spent away from her family in France. Later, I happened to read that she was seven months pregnant on her wedding day. Somewhere else, I picked up that she was a Socialist. About a decade ago, I also read The Children's Book which was heavily inspired by her family life. So I felt that I half knew her but the glimpses that I had caught were both contradictory and compelling. How did she end up bringing up the two children that her husband fathered with his secretary? How did she become both the bread-winner for her family and also gain a reputation as a rabid anti-feminist? So many questions. Seeing a biography with a title like The Life and Loves of Edith Nesbit, I naturally dived right in.
Fitzsimons makes it clear from the beginning that this is not going to be a sentimental memoir of the life of a beloved children's novelist. The book opens with a description of the young Edith visiting the mummies in the Saint-Michel tower in Bordeaux, coming away utterly terrified. Fitzsimons marks this as a key moment in Nesbit's psychology but it was just one of a number of privations and tribulations which marked her childhood. Nesbit's father died before Edith turned four, she had a nomadic childhood as her mother moved the family from place to place to try and improve the health of her older sister who later died of tuberculosis. You can see how this kind of untethered upbringing left her highly vulnerable to the man who would come to overshadow her adult life, Hubert Bland.
Nesbit's husband brings to mind the opening line of C S Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 'There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it'. Indeed, given that Lewis is often seen as being influenced by Nesbit, I almost wonder if Bland was an inspiration for the Scrubb family itself. The more I read about him, the more appalled I was. Nesbit's original fiancé introduced her to Bland and she was so drawn in by his apparent charisma that she ended her relationship and thus ended up seven months pregnant on her wedding day to Bland. But even in these early days, things were not what they appeared. Nesbit lived in rented lodgings while Bland mostly resided with his mother and her paid companion, Maggie Doran. Doran was also pregnant by Bland with both women giving birth within months of each other. And here things get strange. When Edith finally discovered Bland's deception, her response was to befriend Maggie.
Bland seems like one of those ghastly men who manage to manipulate strong women. He and Nesbit were one of the founding members of the Fabian Society but Bland's socialist principles were noticeably self-serving. He was against any barriers to sex outside of marriage but also opposed to women working outside the home. Simultaneous to this, he also refused to find paid employment himself, so Nesbit became the bread-winner, variously designing greeting cards and selling short stories to magazines. Over time, Edith made close friends with a young woman called Alice Hoatson. Hoatson supported Nesbit when she suffered a stillbirth and kept her company on the nights when Bland was 'out' with Maggie. Edith was so attached to Alice that she even consulted a genealogist to see if they were somehow related, even though Alice was mousy and introverted and Edith quite the opposite. Before long, Alice moved into the family home and then even more abruptly gave birth. Edith agreed to adopt the child but it is unclear at what point she discovered that her own husband was the father.
I really struggle to identify with people with lives like these. I had similar issues when reading Amanda Foreman's biography of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire. The duchess' best friend became the duke's mistress and there was even some evidence of some form of dalliance between the two women. I am an unabashed monogamist. I don't have a wandering eye. I would never flirt with someone other than my partner. So the private life of Mr and Mrs Bland seems utterly foreign to me. And for all that the biography's title was The Life and Loves of Edith Nesbit, Fitzsimons seemed remarkably incurious about trying to define it to the reader. Were they what we would now refer to as 'polyamorous'? Certainly Edith seemed to also have various 'romantic' friendships with men during the course of her marriage although Fitzsimons skips delicately over their precise nature. But there was something so pathetic in how Fitzsimons describes Nesbit chasing after George Bernard Shaw and then in Nesbit's own description of her second marriage to Tommy Tucker after Bland's death, 'For the first time in my life I know what it is to possess a man’s whole heart'. She was clearly a strong woman and there is such a tragedy there in how she did not have the love in her life that she deserved.
For all that, I found the Bland family to be rather unsavoury. This was one of those rare biographies where one comes away rather less enamoured with the subject than one was before. I was never a die-hard fan of Nesbit as a child and have even been known to muddle some of her work with that of Frances Hodgson Burnett. I read The Railway Children and Five Children and It along with its assorted sequels but gave up on The Treasure Seekers and have only found bits and pieces of her short-fiction. Still, I had believed her to be a down-to-earth writer, akin to the Mother in The Railway Children. Fitzsimons reveals her as far more mercurial. It was Hoatson who kept house and gave Nesbit the spare time to write and manage her social life. As well as managing the home, Hoatson also seems to have managed Nesbit's moods as best as she could since both Mr and Mrs Bland had a penchant for drama. It was surprising to see quite how closely The Children's Book stuck to the facts. Byatt even named the family the Wellwoods as a direct parallel to Nesbit having lived for many years in Well Hall. Another parallel between Byatt's novel and Nesbit's real life was how the lack of adult irresponsibility impacted on the younger generation.
Nesbit had three biological children as well as her two adoptive offspring via Hoatson. I had been aware that Nesbit's youngest child Fabian had died young. I had not known that he died following an operation to remove his adenoids, a procedure which the boy's parents seemed to have forgotten was taking place given that Edith had to be roused out of bed when the surgeon arrived. This oversight meant that the poor child had not been warned to fast beforehand. This omission is likely to have caused his death. Edith was 'demented by grief' but I just felt so heartbroken for that poor neglected boy. Just as awful is the sad history of Rosamund, eldest child of Hoatson. Supposedly after learning of Fabian's death, Nesbit screamed at Bland, 'Why couldn't it have been Rosamund?' And this was apparently how the poor girl learned the truth about her parentage. There is a fantastic bitchiness to Rosamund's every utterance in the biography, particularly regarding her stepmother, and yet one can see that she has plenty of grounds for resentment. She also seemed to have been groomed by the much older and married HG Wells while very young and even attempted to elope with him to Paris aged twenty. Rosamund's ultimate marriage was not a happy one and she later wrote to Wells that he was the only person to have ever loved her.
With all this in mind, it is was particularly alarming to realise that Nesbit used her own children as a template for the cast of Five Children and It. The contrast between the bucolic adventures depicted on the page and the dark domestic secrets of the Bland household is unsettling. Rosamund stated that one of the reasons that she wished to elope was to escape Hubert's 'unfatherly' attentions. I was particularly struck though by the way that Nesbit clearly doted on 'the Lamb' in Five Children and It, the youngest child. He was inspired by baby John, the 'afterthought' child and indeed Nesbit loved him in real life. Yet he was Alice Hoatson's baby and to add extra salt in the wound, he was born not long after Nesbit suffered a stillbirth during her final pregnancy. Again I cannot even begin to imagine how one mothers a baby born from the betrayal of one's spouse just after suffering such a devastating physical loss. I don't think that my own method would have been to play it all out in children's fiction however. And there is something so strange in how Hoatson continued to refer to Rosamund and John as her 'niece and nephew' even after both the Blands were dead. The past really is another country and they do things differently there.
From start to finish, the life of Edith Nesbit was far from easy. Whether she was E. Nesbit, Mrs Bland or even Mrs Tucker, money was always tight and she was always called on to be the one earning it. Nesbit's grief over Fabian's death spurred her on to the most creative period of her life but it was still her unfortunate fate to see her work fall out of fashion in her later life. The Blands clearly enjoyed company and hosting parties yet they lacked the money to do so comfortably. As the biography progressed, I could only see Hubert Bland as a parasite feeding off his wife's talents and dragging her down. He was heavily opposed to female suffrage, opining, '“Votes for Women? Votes for children! Votes for dogs!” so it is not hard to concur with Fitzsimon's theory that he was also behind Nesbit's disastrous speech on 'Natural Disabilities of Women' in front of an aghast Fabian Women's Group. I suspect that Mrs Tucker was able to recognise the many, many ways in which Mr Bland had been an appalling husband but Mrs Bland seems to have been in utter thrall to him.
I am always strangely surprised when authors are revealed as motivated by monetary rather than artistic rewards. It is as if I see the books that I love as presents rather than objects of a financial transaction. The Railway Children in particular is such a thing of beauty, particularly its stunning closing lines. Fitzsimons traces how Nesbit's life can be seen reflected in her work but it is obvious that her primary motivation was to support her family. She was no hobby writer, she wrote for survival. Never mind her husband's high-minded views on women, Nesbit was a woman who worked. Bland had Alice Hoatson to be the good little wife who kept the hearth warm. While Fitzsimons is an extremely talented writer and the biography is highly-researched and accessible, it is probably obvious by now that I found it a pretty bleak read. From the mummies in the opening chapter onwards, Nesbit endured horrors of many kinds and only seems to have found security in her marriage during her final years. Fitzsimons describes a complex, challenging and contrary women but for all her faults, I could only I wish Nesbit's soul peace. Her legacy is a rich one and how she deserves to be remembered. I look forward to when I can read The Railway Children to my own offspring.
October 27, 2019
I love E. Nesbit’s magical books so damn much. Five Children and It is a delight, though I think The Enchanted Castle might be my favourite, partly because the Ugly-Wuglies are utterly horrifying even now. Admittedly I’m more lukewarm about the non-magical ones (yes, sorry, even The Railway Children), but still. When I spotted this new biography of her on Netgalley, I immediately requested it.
I knew very little about Edith Nesbit before reading the book – the name of her husband and the fact that she was a founding member of the socialist Fabian Society, but that’s about it. This biography doesn’t go into details about the Fabian Society itself, which ends up giving the odd impression that it was a bit woolly and ineffectual, which is in fact the opposite of the truth. It concentrates more on her relationships with other members than on any activism she participated in. Of course, she was raising a gaggle of children (including two who were her husband’s mistress’s) as well as often being the financial mainstay of the household, so she probably didn’t have as much time for political activism as her husband and other members of the Society.
It was disappointing to discover that Edith opposed votes for women, despite the fact that many members of the Fabian Society were in favour. It seems that she trotted out the argument, still in vogue today, that fighting for the rights of a particular group will somehow harm everybody else, when in fact the opposite is usually true. I’m not angry… just disappointed! But that’s part of finding out about people; there’s always something upsetting.
There’s a lot of focus, as you might expect from a book titled The Life and Loves of…, on Edith’s relationships, friendly, romantic, and other. I’ll confess right now that after reading this biography I detest her husband, Hubert Bland. He sounds incredibly obnoxious with his sleeping around and his snobbery and his arrogance. Many of their friends seemed to feel that Edith as well as her husband enjoyed all the drama, but there’s a lot of other evidence that the marriage wasn’t particularly happy, and I can’t help feeling that perhaps she was creating a façade so that outsiders (and even she herself) would think that she was happy. I find it very telling that after she married her second husband, she commented that she’d never before felt completely loved by a man.
The majority of the aforementioned evidence comes from other people, especially family and friends. Edith herself wasn’t a journal keeper and although various letters are quoted, it seems that she either wasn’t such a prolific letter-writer as some folk, or few of her letters survived. She wrote about her childhood a few times, and a couple of those sources are extensively quoted, but otherwise she seems to have written relatively little that was directly biographical. Eleanor Fitzsimons frequently turns to Edith’s writing in an attempt to understand her feelings about people and events through the way she fictionalised them. It’s very interesting to see how many parallels there are between her life and her writings, though as an evidence-gathering exercise it is often inconclusive.
Despite this, a lot of people who knew Edith seem to have written or spoken about her. Her membership of the Fabian Society, as well as her gregarious nature and growing fame as a writer, meant that she met and knew many important people, all of whom had something to say about her. Eleanor Fitzsimons has obviously done a ton of research. Reading The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit, you do feel as though she knows pretty much everything there is to be known about Edith. It was interesting to see in her acknowledgements that the two previous biographies were so good that she wasn’t sure she could bring anything new. I guess she decided she could, and I’d love to know exactly what those new things were! Anyway, her research was clearly exhaustive and she has made excellent use of it.
It’s easy for a book that contains a lot of information to become dry and boring, but Eleanor Fitzsimons has a way of presenting Edith’s life story that is immensely readable. She goes into a fair amount of detail about certain people and events, but she’s always bringing up something new, or doing a little speculation, or breaking up mere facts with some parallel from Edith’s fiction. She has a way of painting people so that you feel you know them and of bringing events to life. By the end I was only eager to know more!
The only strange thing about this book was the way that footnotes are used, because there are two different sets. Those expanding on information given were marked by asterisks and placed at the end of each chapter, whereas those giving references for quotes and information were marked by numbers, and all those notes were at the end of the book. Yet the lines were blurred by expanding on information in some of the reference notes, and I can’t help thinking it would be simpler and more readable to have a single set of notes.
Although I’ve written an entire paragraph about it, that’s a very minor complaint. This was a very well-researched and well-written biography of E. Nesbit. It felt really comprehensive and was an excellent and easy read. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about this brilliant writer.
Thanks to Netgalley for the free ARC.
See all my reviews on my blog https://thewearybookcase.home.blog/
I knew very little about Edith Nesbit before reading the book – the name of her husband and the fact that she was a founding member of the socialist Fabian Society, but that’s about it. This biography doesn’t go into details about the Fabian Society itself, which ends up giving the odd impression that it was a bit woolly and ineffectual, which is in fact the opposite of the truth. It concentrates more on her relationships with other members than on any activism she participated in. Of course, she was raising a gaggle of children (including two who were her husband’s mistress’s) as well as often being the financial mainstay of the household, so she probably didn’t have as much time for political activism as her husband and other members of the Society.
It was disappointing to discover that Edith opposed votes for women, despite the fact that many members of the Fabian Society were in favour. It seems that she trotted out the argument, still in vogue today, that fighting for the rights of a particular group will somehow harm everybody else, when in fact the opposite is usually true. I’m not angry… just disappointed! But that’s part of finding out about people; there’s always something upsetting.
There’s a lot of focus, as you might expect from a book titled The Life and Loves of…, on Edith’s relationships, friendly, romantic, and other. I’ll confess right now that after reading this biography I detest her husband, Hubert Bland. He sounds incredibly obnoxious with his sleeping around and his snobbery and his arrogance. Many of their friends seemed to feel that Edith as well as her husband enjoyed all the drama, but there’s a lot of other evidence that the marriage wasn’t particularly happy, and I can’t help feeling that perhaps she was creating a façade so that outsiders (and even she herself) would think that she was happy. I find it very telling that after she married her second husband, she commented that she’d never before felt completely loved by a man.
The majority of the aforementioned evidence comes from other people, especially family and friends. Edith herself wasn’t a journal keeper and although various letters are quoted, it seems that she either wasn’t such a prolific letter-writer as some folk, or few of her letters survived. She wrote about her childhood a few times, and a couple of those sources are extensively quoted, but otherwise she seems to have written relatively little that was directly biographical. Eleanor Fitzsimons frequently turns to Edith’s writing in an attempt to understand her feelings about people and events through the way she fictionalised them. It’s very interesting to see how many parallels there are between her life and her writings, though as an evidence-gathering exercise it is often inconclusive.
Despite this, a lot of people who knew Edith seem to have written or spoken about her. Her membership of the Fabian Society, as well as her gregarious nature and growing fame as a writer, meant that she met and knew many important people, all of whom had something to say about her. Eleanor Fitzsimons has obviously done a ton of research. Reading The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit, you do feel as though she knows pretty much everything there is to be known about Edith. It was interesting to see in her acknowledgements that the two previous biographies were so good that she wasn’t sure she could bring anything new. I guess she decided she could, and I’d love to know exactly what those new things were! Anyway, her research was clearly exhaustive and she has made excellent use of it.
It’s easy for a book that contains a lot of information to become dry and boring, but Eleanor Fitzsimons has a way of presenting Edith’s life story that is immensely readable. She goes into a fair amount of detail about certain people and events, but she’s always bringing up something new, or doing a little speculation, or breaking up mere facts with some parallel from Edith’s fiction. She has a way of painting people so that you feel you know them and of bringing events to life. By the end I was only eager to know more!
The only strange thing about this book was the way that footnotes are used, because there are two different sets. Those expanding on information given were marked by asterisks and placed at the end of each chapter, whereas those giving references for quotes and information were marked by numbers, and all those notes were at the end of the book. Yet the lines were blurred by expanding on information in some of the reference notes, and I can’t help thinking it would be simpler and more readable to have a single set of notes.
Although I’ve written an entire paragraph about it, that’s a very minor complaint. This was a very well-researched and well-written biography of E. Nesbit. It felt really comprehensive and was an excellent and easy read. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about this brilliant writer.
Thanks to Netgalley for the free ARC.
See all my reviews on my blog https://thewearybookcase.home.blog/
June 27, 2020
Very mediocre - what's the point of writing a bio if all your sources are the previous bios? Better read Briggs!
Read
October 24, 2020Chaste loves
Boring book
Boring book
November 11, 2019
I was given this book by Netgalley as a proof copy. I was a huge fan of E Nesbit as a child growing up in the Seventies. There simply weren't that many modern children's books around back then. The boom in children's publishing only really got going with the success of J.K. Rowling, so for a voracious reader, which I was, once you had exhausted the modern authors, you had to visit the past. I grew up loving The Treasure Seekers, The Phoenix and the Carpet etc. My least favourite, interestingly, because it was the most widely read of her books, was The Railway Children. As an adult I had to re-read some of her work for a course in children's literature. I was worried it wouldn't be as wonderful as I remembered. I need not have worried. Her prose is vivid, surprisingly modern in tone and very funny. It reawakened my interest in her as a person, particularly after having read A. S. Byatt's fictionalised version of her life. This book is fascinating an extremely readable if you are interested in the woman behind the books. Her life was unorthodox and remarkably hard, but you can't say she didn't live to the full. I loved this.
January 20, 2020
Since I haven't read any other biographies of this most important children's fantasy writer, I was hoping to get a bit more depth from this one. Fitzsimons seems to take for granted that we know the dates and titles of each of Nesbit's books, and leaves out a bibliography which would have been useful. Also adding substance would have been more quotations from the letters which are hinted at. The author of the biography focuses on the loves of Nesbit, and how her fiction tied into the work, interspersing quotes from her fiction with descriptions of the actual people it supposedly describes.
Nesbit was married to a flamboyant philanderer, and raised several of his children by her close friend, all in their house. It is not clear how many affairs she had with men, but she did try for and fail at George Bernard Shaw, who remained a close friend. H.G. Wells was just one of the other luminaries she associated with during her stint as a founding member of the Fabian Society. Her politics -- to fight for the working class-- to advance the cause of socialism -- seemed as much intent on preserving the way of life she enjoyed-- living in a genteel countryside without too many modern conveniences -- as protecting the rights of the downtrodden. She did however put her money where her mouth was, and sponsored charity events for those poor children in the scantily funded school near one of her idyllic country retreats.
Most surprising is how she did not take on the cause of feminism, deferring to her inferior husband's views of women, and her suspicion that feminism would threaten the cause of socialism, her main aim in life.
She befriended Noel Coward toward the end of her life. She produced dozens of books, provided for her family the lion's share of income, and was very good at finding beautiful homes in which to entertain guests. She had a lively sensibility and a warm heart. Her genius was writing fantasies for children who recognized themselves as real people in her stories. The book left me hungry for more information, and eager to read her fiction (and reread the books I have read).
Nesbit was married to a flamboyant philanderer, and raised several of his children by her close friend, all in their house. It is not clear how many affairs she had with men, but she did try for and fail at George Bernard Shaw, who remained a close friend. H.G. Wells was just one of the other luminaries she associated with during her stint as a founding member of the Fabian Society. Her politics -- to fight for the working class-- to advance the cause of socialism -- seemed as much intent on preserving the way of life she enjoyed-- living in a genteel countryside without too many modern conveniences -- as protecting the rights of the downtrodden. She did however put her money where her mouth was, and sponsored charity events for those poor children in the scantily funded school near one of her idyllic country retreats.
Most surprising is how she did not take on the cause of feminism, deferring to her inferior husband's views of women, and her suspicion that feminism would threaten the cause of socialism, her main aim in life.
She befriended Noel Coward toward the end of her life. She produced dozens of books, provided for her family the lion's share of income, and was very good at finding beautiful homes in which to entertain guests. She had a lively sensibility and a warm heart. Her genius was writing fantasies for children who recognized themselves as real people in her stories. The book left me hungry for more information, and eager to read her fiction (and reread the books I have read).
October 26, 2019
Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit is a detailed and fascinating biography of beloved children's author and poet E. Nesbit. Released 17th Oct 2019 by Duckworth Books, it's ~400 pages and available in ebook format (other editions may be available in other formats).
I remember growing up on a steady diet of weekend trips to the public library where, wonder of wonders, I could pick out ANY books I wanted. (I still get a thrill going into a library, more than half a century later). I discovered and devoured The Railway Children, The Psammead books, so many hours of delicious escapism and the ones she wrote, I revisited again and again. I felt then, and still feel, that she really understood how kids think and feel on some fundamental level. I think most readers of English have encountered her books at one point or another. I was previously unaware, however, except in the vaguest terms, anything whatever about her life.
This biography is meticulously researched, exhaustively annotated, and so well written. The author has a lyrical voice and at the same time a spare and respectful manner writing about her subject. Though precisely and minutely researched, it's anything but dull, and Ms. Fitzsimons doesn't shy away from covering the tragic parts of Nesbit's life.
I heartily recommend this one to anyone who enjoys biographies or has enjoyed Nesbit's oeuvre as a child (or grownup). This is a worthy biography of a worthy subject who isn't well represented in print currently.
Five stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit is a detailed and fascinating biography of beloved children's author and poet E. Nesbit. Released 17th Oct 2019 by Duckworth Books, it's ~400 pages and available in ebook format (other editions may be available in other formats).
I remember growing up on a steady diet of weekend trips to the public library where, wonder of wonders, I could pick out ANY books I wanted. (I still get a thrill going into a library, more than half a century later). I discovered and devoured The Railway Children, The Psammead books, so many hours of delicious escapism and the ones she wrote, I revisited again and again. I felt then, and still feel, that she really understood how kids think and feel on some fundamental level. I think most readers of English have encountered her books at one point or another. I was previously unaware, however, except in the vaguest terms, anything whatever about her life.
This biography is meticulously researched, exhaustively annotated, and so well written. The author has a lyrical voice and at the same time a spare and respectful manner writing about her subject. Though precisely and minutely researched, it's anything but dull, and Ms. Fitzsimons doesn't shy away from covering the tragic parts of Nesbit's life.
I heartily recommend this one to anyone who enjoys biographies or has enjoyed Nesbit's oeuvre as a child (or grownup). This is a worthy biography of a worthy subject who isn't well represented in print currently.
Five stars.
Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.
June 21, 2020
This is a somewhat tiring account of a disappointing person- the qualities illustrated are cycled as her life story meanders: her bird-like features, her ubiquitous long cigarette holder, her love of nature, her hospitable but undisciplined household, her socialist and progressive advocacies, and the capricious sexual morality that revolved around egoism and emotional drama. Somehow the portrait is mostly sympathetic, though thankfully the author does include some honest opinions from burned relationships, most notably from HG Wells (himself a philandering cradle robber.) Nesbit was a free thinker and, say some, a brilliant literary one, though her plots were borrowed and her characters drawn from the people with whom she surrounded herself. The books she wanted to write were not those for which she won acclaim. Her children’s books, written largely to support her somewhat extravagant lifestyle, apparently did not give her the reputation or “style” she longed for, though these are the books which were most successful. Fitzsimons spends more time on Nesbit’s adult novels than on the ones she wrote for children, unfortunately. Nesbit’s gift in writing for children was her ability to write with the voice of a child. Perhaps it was her own childlike nature, including her self indulgence, rebellious spirit, egoism, and penchant for tantrums that informed her characters easily. Even her charity and hospitality seemed conditioned on obeisance and humble adoration. Her social network included the likes of George Bernard Shaw, E.M. Forster, W. B. Yeats, G.K. Chesterton, as well as H.G. Wells, and so the author gives a vivid picture of the active literary scene of turn-of-the-century England. Fitzsimons makes an extra effort to keep fresh the many recurring characters and personalities of Nesbit’s full and busy social life.
January 25, 2020
Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with an ARC of this book, in exchange for a fair and honest review.
When I saw that a biography of E. Nesbit was available, I fondly remembered reading her books as a child, especially the books in the Five Children and It series. For the most part, children don't really care about the authors of books they like- and anything to do with the author of these books never entered my mind. If you had asked me to guess what the author was like, I probably would have told you that she was a sweet, Beatrix Potter sort of lady, living in a little cottage in rural England, writing tales to amuse the grandchildren.
Not so much! As I read this biography, I kept saying, "wait, WHEN was this?" She was not just a socialist, but also a woman with various relationships outside her marriage (although the nature and extent of these relationships is kept somewhat vague in the biography). It was clear, though, that her husband was certainly engaged in all sorts of relationships, including fathering children who were passed off as children of the marriage. And, various lovers of Hubert Bland (her husband) lived with them for periods of time, even if things were not always perfectly harmonious.
And, throughout the book, we are constantly told about numerous people in their political and social circles, male and female, who are constantly having affairs, having children out of wedlock, etc. Not what we think of when we think of the Victorian era!
It was somewhat disconcerting to read that she was basically against feminism and woman's suffrage, with quotes from talks she gave suggesting that women only existed to be with their men. Ironic, really, since she appears to have been the primary support of the family, including her husband's lovers and illegitimate children.
The main problem with this book, for me, is that I never felt that I knew E. Nesbit as a human being. While this was a fascinating look at the political and social circles in which she lived, it frequently seemed more like a book about that group of people in that time, more than a book that gave me insight into her as a person. She served as the central pole around which the other characters revolved, but I came away feeling that I knew more about these other people than I did about her.
Despite that, I did enjoy reading this, although more as a history of a group of people in that time than as an individual biography.
When I saw that a biography of E. Nesbit was available, I fondly remembered reading her books as a child, especially the books in the Five Children and It series. For the most part, children don't really care about the authors of books they like- and anything to do with the author of these books never entered my mind. If you had asked me to guess what the author was like, I probably would have told you that she was a sweet, Beatrix Potter sort of lady, living in a little cottage in rural England, writing tales to amuse the grandchildren.
Not so much! As I read this biography, I kept saying, "wait, WHEN was this?" She was not just a socialist, but also a woman with various relationships outside her marriage (although the nature and extent of these relationships is kept somewhat vague in the biography). It was clear, though, that her husband was certainly engaged in all sorts of relationships, including fathering children who were passed off as children of the marriage. And, various lovers of Hubert Bland (her husband) lived with them for periods of time, even if things were not always perfectly harmonious.
And, throughout the book, we are constantly told about numerous people in their political and social circles, male and female, who are constantly having affairs, having children out of wedlock, etc. Not what we think of when we think of the Victorian era!
It was somewhat disconcerting to read that she was basically against feminism and woman's suffrage, with quotes from talks she gave suggesting that women only existed to be with their men. Ironic, really, since she appears to have been the primary support of the family, including her husband's lovers and illegitimate children.
The main problem with this book, for me, is that I never felt that I knew E. Nesbit as a human being. While this was a fascinating look at the political and social circles in which she lived, it frequently seemed more like a book about that group of people in that time, more than a book that gave me insight into her as a person. She served as the central pole around which the other characters revolved, but I came away feeling that I knew more about these other people than I did about her.
Despite that, I did enjoy reading this, although more as a history of a group of people in that time than as an individual biography.
September 27, 2019
The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit
Victorian Iconoclast, Children’s Author, and Creator of The Railway Children
by Eleanor Fitzsimons
ABRAMS
Abrams Press
Biographies & Memoirs
Pub Date 08 Oct 2019
I am reviewing a copy of The Life and Loves of E Nesbit through Abrams and Netgalley:
Edith Nesbit was the fifth child of Sarah and John Nesbit was born on August.15.1858. When Edith was only eleven she began to write poetry.
Edith Nesbit is considered to be the first modern writer for Children and the inventor of the children’s adventure story.
I’m this book we learn that she was a fabulous socialite that she was love and admired by a dozen men, including George Bernard Shaw. She through legendary parties and was a profiling lecturer and writer on Socialism and we learn how she incorporated those ideas into her writing and I’m doing so she influenced a generation of children an aspect of her literary legacy never before examined. Fitzsimons’s riveting biography brings new light to the life and works of this famed literary icon, a remarkable writer and woman.
I give The Life and Loves of E.Nesbit five out of five stars!
Happy Reading!
Victorian Iconoclast, Children’s Author, and Creator of The Railway Children
by Eleanor Fitzsimons
ABRAMS
Abrams Press
Biographies & Memoirs
Pub Date 08 Oct 2019
I am reviewing a copy of The Life and Loves of E Nesbit through Abrams and Netgalley:
Edith Nesbit was the fifth child of Sarah and John Nesbit was born on August.15.1858. When Edith was only eleven she began to write poetry.
Edith Nesbit is considered to be the first modern writer for Children and the inventor of the children’s adventure story.
I’m this book we learn that she was a fabulous socialite that she was love and admired by a dozen men, including George Bernard Shaw. She through legendary parties and was a profiling lecturer and writer on Socialism and we learn how she incorporated those ideas into her writing and I’m doing so she influenced a generation of children an aspect of her literary legacy never before examined. Fitzsimons’s riveting biography brings new light to the life and works of this famed literary icon, a remarkable writer and woman.
I give The Life and Loves of E.Nesbit five out of five stars!
Happy Reading!
April 19, 2020
As someone who loved having my imagination whisked away by E E Nesbit’s books as a child, I was fascinated to read this biography. This well-known author turns out to have led an eventful – not always happily so – life and been a very interesting person with many views well in advance of her time. I was riveted, not just by the discovery of these facts but by the very clear, readable style of biographer Eleanor Fitzsimons. You never feel bogged down by facts about, for example, Nesbit’s involvement with the Fabian Society, and you never lose the sense of E E Nesbit as a person. She’s more than just the subject-matter of this book: she really does seem to live within its pages. You understand the assorted complex facets of her life that shaped her and her writing.
Fascinating and informative, this is a beautifully written biography. We mustn’t forget to praise the author of the book as well as the author who is its subject. Ms Fitzsimons has obviously done an enormous amount of research to put herself into Nesbit’s shoes and give us such a convincing portrayal of this literary giant’s life that is a pleasure to read.
Fascinating and informative, this is a beautifully written biography. We mustn’t forget to praise the author of the book as well as the author who is its subject. Ms Fitzsimons has obviously done an enormous amount of research to put herself into Nesbit’s shoes and give us such a convincing portrayal of this literary giant’s life that is a pleasure to read.
July 9, 2020
2020 Rubery Book Award Non Fiction Winner
This is a well-written biography, beautifully put together, and something of a revelation, both in terms of Nesbit’s astonishing creative energy, and pleasing eccentricity. The book offers nice portraits of her many interesting friends, lovers, and acquaintances, particularly G. B. Shaw, and it presents an informative, entertaining context for her work, quoting extensively from letters, newspapers and previous biographies. References to Nesbit’s books are woven into the biographical detail, how the name of a real-life acquaintance or friend was chosen for one of her characters, so since it's subtitled 'author of the Railway Children', it’s perhaps surprising that there isn’t more information about the genesis and development of her most famous book. But this isn't really a shortcoming. All in all, the depth and breadth of Fitzsimons’ research is very apparent and it's a well-researched, eminently readable biography of an impressive woman.
www.ruberybookaward.com
This is a well-written biography, beautifully put together, and something of a revelation, both in terms of Nesbit’s astonishing creative energy, and pleasing eccentricity. The book offers nice portraits of her many interesting friends, lovers, and acquaintances, particularly G. B. Shaw, and it presents an informative, entertaining context for her work, quoting extensively from letters, newspapers and previous biographies. References to Nesbit’s books are woven into the biographical detail, how the name of a real-life acquaintance or friend was chosen for one of her characters, so since it's subtitled 'author of the Railway Children', it’s perhaps surprising that there isn’t more information about the genesis and development of her most famous book. But this isn't really a shortcoming. All in all, the depth and breadth of Fitzsimons’ research is very apparent and it's a well-researched, eminently readable biography of an impressive woman.
www.ruberybookaward.com
January 7, 2023
I've had this on my list since it was published so good to get a copy for Xmas. Nesbit is a fascinating person whatever you think about her books - and I've been a fan of her writing for children since I saw the adaptation of The Phoenix and the Carpet which would have been when I was about four. I liked (and like tbh) nothing better than the mixture of magic and normality she writes so well.
I knew a bit about her - that she had an unconventional marriage, and that she was a socialist - but there are other things I didn't know, like the fact that she was a Baconian, eek. Anyway like all my favourite Edwardians (I suppose she wasn't really an Edwardian) she knew all the usual suspects, Shaw, Wells, Annie Besant, the brothers and sisters of other famous people - and her life was edged with tragedy, with endless deaths of friends and children. This is detailed and well-written and if the things the Fabian Society was railing against are all back with a vengence (and they are), we have no one to blame but ourselves.
I knew a bit about her - that she had an unconventional marriage, and that she was a socialist - but there are other things I didn't know, like the fact that she was a Baconian, eek. Anyway like all my favourite Edwardians (I suppose she wasn't really an Edwardian) she knew all the usual suspects, Shaw, Wells, Annie Besant, the brothers and sisters of other famous people - and her life was edged with tragedy, with endless deaths of friends and children. This is detailed and well-written and if the things the Fabian Society was railing against are all back with a vengence (and they are), we have no one to blame but ourselves.
August 27, 2024
I’ve never read Edith Nesbit’s books, although I loved the movie of The Railway Children, but this is a fascinating and well-researched biography of this Victorian children’s novelist. It focuses on her life rather than her writing, which went far beyond children’s books, and puts paid to most of our stereotypes about Victoria women. Maybe the most stereotypical thing Nesbit did was to stay with her womanizer husband, and raise two of the children he had by another woman who lived with them and called the children her niece and nephew. But Nesbit’s rationale for doing so had more to do with her relatively radical beliefs and principles about things like free love, than it did with Victorianism.
She and her husband were early Fabian Socialists and their social circles included many fascinating men of the time such as HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Did she have affairs with several such men? Fitzsimons implies the possibility; at the least she had close friendships with a number of them. And it was Nesbit who supported the household with her writing, and seems to have made the decisions about where they lived. An eye-opening book.
She and her husband were early Fabian Socialists and their social circles included many fascinating men of the time such as HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Did she have affairs with several such men? Fitzsimons implies the possibility; at the least she had close friendships with a number of them. And it was Nesbit who supported the household with her writing, and seems to have made the decisions about where they lived. An eye-opening book.
March 5, 2020
Good workmanlike biography of one of the seminal children's authors, whose adventurous stories (Five Children and It, The Pheonix and the Carpet, The Story of the Amulet) I thoroughly enjoyed as a child.
Edith Nesbit was an eminent Victorian Socialist & intellectual, a talented eccentric married to a particularly horrible example of a Free-thinking, philandering egotist. She put up with a lot, but she could write brilliant, engaging child characters who were very real, with all their flaws and blind spots, their loyalties and instincts, somewhat modelled on her own children (three of her own, plus an adopted 2 by way of a mistress of her rotten husband's).
Not an altogether uplifting tale, but interesting nonetheless as a window into family mores in the last half of the 1800s in England, and the beginnings of a genuine literature specifically for children.
Edith Nesbit was an eminent Victorian Socialist & intellectual, a talented eccentric married to a particularly horrible example of a Free-thinking, philandering egotist. She put up with a lot, but she could write brilliant, engaging child characters who were very real, with all their flaws and blind spots, their loyalties and instincts, somewhat modelled on her own children (three of her own, plus an adopted 2 by way of a mistress of her rotten husband's).
Not an altogether uplifting tale, but interesting nonetheless as a window into family mores in the last half of the 1800s in England, and the beginnings of a genuine literature specifically for children.
March 23, 2023
Edith Nesbit influenced many writers, including C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. I loved The Railway Children one of her most popular books.
Growing up, her life was very different from what I expected and was difficult for her. She had a haphazard education sometimes being at home, sometimes attending private or boarding schools. She was exceptional bright (except in math). Her adult life continued the same pattern of being a free spirit.
She had to continually write to survive financially. Her husband was also a writer, but she seemed to hold the family together. Edith endured her husband's unfaithfulness but never seemed to to let it bother her. Later in life she made a comment that seemed to discount that.
The book was well written and researched. The lower rating was more from the content rather than the writing.
Growing up, her life was very different from what I expected and was difficult for her. She had a haphazard education sometimes being at home, sometimes attending private or boarding schools. She was exceptional bright (except in math). Her adult life continued the same pattern of being a free spirit.
She had to continually write to survive financially. Her husband was also a writer, but she seemed to hold the family together. Edith endured her husband's unfaithfulness but never seemed to to let it bother her. Later in life she made a comment that seemed to discount that.
The book was well written and researched. The lower rating was more from the content rather than the writing.
November 27, 2019
I thoroughly enjoyed this somewhat academic biography of E. Nesbit. Her life was full of love, books, writing, and family. She was involved in so many things, including the Fabians, it’s hard to know where to start.
While I listened to this biography, I remembered my delight at reading
. I want to go back and reread her works.
For a discussion of the performance by Marlain Angelides, see AudioFile Magazine http://www.audiofilemagazine.com
NOTE: There’s no GR link to the audio performance.
While I listened to this biography, I remembered my delight at reading
. I want to go back and reread her works.For a discussion of the performance by Marlain Angelides, see AudioFile Magazine http://www.audiofilemagazine.com
NOTE: There’s no GR link to the audio performance.
June 6, 2020
Credited with being the inventor of the children's adventure story Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) also helped found the Fabian Society, hosted a socialist salon attended by such people as George Bernard Shaw. and H.G. Wells. She was married to Hubert Bland, a noted ladies' man and raised two of his illegitimate children as her own. Often very generous, she struggled financially later in life when her books went out of fashion. Her children's books influenced a number of children's authors, including Edgar Eager, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling for which the world owes her a huge debt of gratituide.
February 13, 2020
interesting to hear about where the ideas for the children's books come from--the combination of childhood experience and the people she was intimate with through the Fabian society etc. for me it was the characterizations of the children in her books that was the draw and this seems to come directly from her life, both her childhood and her children's.
i kind of wished the book, rather than being a comprehensive biography, had focused on that-her conceptualization of childhood and children-and had pulled in elements of biography to support that.
i kind of wished the book, rather than being a comprehensive biography, had focused on that-her conceptualization of childhood and children-and had pulled in elements of biography to support that.
July 19, 2020
A great writer and fascinating woman, who shaped so much of our consciousness through her perception of how children in particular see the world, and her insistence on accurately reflecting that view. I kept thinking of A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book and her portrayal of a character inspired by Nesbit in all her self-conscious, well-meaning Edwardian Bohemianism. But there's so much to her real life story, and this reads like an amazing novel, even more impressive because of Fitzsimons' scrupulous research and love of her subject. Great stuff!
July 19, 2020
As this was gifted to me, I otherwise would not have read. It was extraordinary. Nesbit influenced favorite authors . I also found it interesting that authors, playwrights, artists, poets of that time period gathered, vacationed, visited, shared , celebrated, cohabitated . They were a special group of people. The biography is a new and rich exploration of E. Nesbit and I look forward to discovering her writing myself.
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