E. Nesbit

E. Nesbit (1858-1924), British writer, who is best known for children's books such as The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) and The Railway Children (1906), both of which are stories about sets of brothers and sisters and their adventures. Nesbit was born in London and educated at various schools in England, France, and Germany. Nesbit's family finally settled in England when she was 13 years of age. By the time she was 15 years of age, magazines had begun to accept her poetry for publication.

Nesbit and fellow British writers Hubert Bland (her first husband) and George Bernard Shaw were founding members of the socialist, educational Fabian Society. Nesbit took up writing as a career in order to support an unconventional household, which included her husband's illegitimate children, but despite her prolific publishing, the family's finances were often unstable. Nesbit's literary circle also included British writers H. G. Wells and Laurence Housman, who provided Nesbit with the plot for her children's book The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904). Under the pen names Fabian Bland and E. Bland, Nesbit published poetry and suspense/horror novels for adults, such as The House with No Address (1909). Although she mainly thought of herself as a poet, her poetry and novels have been largely forgotten, as her strength was writing for children.

Many of Nesbit's books for children, which are classics, describe a fantastic dimension, where the protagonists, for example, travel through time, as in The House of Arden (1908), or conduct various experiments with magic talismans, as in Five Children and It (1902) and The Enchanted Castle (1907). Nesbit's interest in socialism is reflected in some of her children's fiction. In The Story of the Amulet (1906), for example, versions of past and future societies are juxtaposed and compared with that of the time the novel was written, implicitly providing critical comment on the shortcomings of the present society. The most memorable feature of Nesbit's writing for children, however, is the humor she achieves as a result of adopting a child's perspective toward adult behavior and the adult world, a technique that is especially apparent in The Story of the Treasure Seekers and its sequels.