Edith Nesbit — a children’s writer of genius who disinherited her own adopted offspring

‘When one writes for children,’ the novelist Jill Paton Walsh has said, ‘there are more people in the room. Writing for children involves the adult writer, and the child that writer once was; the present child reader, and the adult that child will become.’

Edith Nesbit, one of the greatest writers for children, was brilliantly attentive to this quartet. What she remembered clearly was childhood’s capacity for belief. At the moment when, in Five Children and It, the Psammead emerges from the sand, she comments: ‘It is wonderful how quickly you get used to things, even the most astonishing.’ In The Phoenix and the Carpet those same children find a mythical bird in their fireplace. They are ‘hardly astonished at all’.

Nesbit’s fairies and phoenices — how’s that for a pedantic plural? — are discovered not in a topsy-turvy Wonderland or a moral allegory but in a pet shop in Camden Town or a room in a suburban villa. In populating the recognisable world with flashes of the supernatural, she diverted the course of children’s literature. It is no surprise that J.K. Rowling, who treats magic with worldly logic, is a Nesbit devotee. Buying a uniform for wizard school? Fine, but it will need a name-tag.

Nesbit’s life (1858–1924) is a complex gift for a biographer. Passionate and impressionable, she married the journalist Hubert Bland; the couple helped to found the socialist debating club that became the Fabian Society. Nesbit’s best friend moved in as housekeeper, was promptly seduced by Hubert, and bore him two children whom Nesbit raised as her own. A vivid and unconventional matriarch of this rackety household, she gained fame as a poet and financial success as a children’s writer. After Bland’s death, she found brief happiness with a marine engineer, and cut her adopted children from her will.