Edith Nesbit

Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) was an English writer and poet who, as E. Nesbit, wrote The Railway Children and Five Children and It and has been cited as the creator of modern children's fantasy. She co-founded the socialist Fabian Society with her husband Hubert Bland, and died at New Romney, Kent, in 1924.

Nesbit wrote or collaborated on more than 60 books. Her first novel about the Bastable children, The Story of the Treasure Seekers, appeared in 1899. Five Children and It (1902), in which a family meets a wish-granting sand fairy, began as stories in the Strand Magazine and was followed by The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906). The Railway Children was serialised in The London Magazine from January 1905 and published as a book in 1906. Her habit of placing magic in ordinary, present-day settings influenced writers from C. S. Lewis and P. L. Travers to Diana Wynne Jones and J. K. Rowling; her biographer Julia Briggs called her the first modern writer for children. She lived at Well Hall in Eltham from 1899 to 1920 and, after Bland's death, married Thomas Tucker in 1917. The Edith Nesbit Society was founded in 1996.

For collectors

The key first editions are her fantasy and family stories of 1899 to 1907. Five Children and It was first published in book form by T. Fisher Unwin in 1902 with illustrations by H. R. Millar, and has never been out of print. The Railway Children was first published in London in 1906 by Wells Gardner, Darton & Co. with illustrations by C. E. Brock (309 pages), with a US edition from Macmillan.