Edith Nesbit and Her Books

the daughter of Sarah and John Collis Nesbit. Her first years were spent with her two brothers and sisters at the family agricultural college. After the sudden death of her father, and one of her sister's ill health, they lived in various parts of the country before young Edith was sent to boarding school. After a bitter experience there the family travelled throughout France, and Edith attended school there and in Germany, often plagued by homesickness.

The next few years were a source of many happy memories and influences on Nesbit's future writing. Adventures in and around the local pond, the surrounding gardens, investigating secret passageways in their home, and walking down the railway tracks that crossed the back fields with her brothers were events she would later develop in her popular stories for children. She started to write around the age of fourteen.

contemporary children in real-world settings with magical objects and adventures and sometimes travel to fantastic worlds.

(1906). The novel is about the adventures of a middle class Edwardian family living near a railway station in the suburbs of London at the turn of the 19th century.

buried in the churchyard of St Mary in the Marsh.

Summarizing Nesbit's achievement, Claudia Nelson concluded in the Dictionary of Literary Biography that "in writing for children Nesbit proved her ability to combine humor and sympathy, the personal and the universal”.