The Wouldbegoods

Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), who published as E. Nesbit, was born in London and spent an itinerant childhood following her widowed mother around England and the Continent in search of a healthier climate for a sickly older sister. In 1880 she married Hubert Bland, with whom she co-founded the socialist Fabian Society the following year; his chronic infidelity and the unconventional household that resulted — for years she raised two of his children by his mistress and secretary alongside her own — left her the family's primary breadwinner, and she wrote constantly and commercially to support it. Turning to children's fiction in her forties, she found her lasting form in stories of ordinary children who stumble into real magic within recognisably everyday English settings: Five Children and It (1902), introducing the cantankerous sand-fairy the Psammead, began a trilogy continued in The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906), alongside The Railway Children (1906). Her blend of the fantastic and the domestic directly shaped later writers including C. S. Lewis and Edward Eager. She died in Kent at sixty-five.