The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit

This was a brilliantly written and well-researched biography about an author that I didn't realize had such an interesting life. I have been really into biographies lately or might have skipped over this one. I am so glad that I didn't, as Edith Nesbit lived quite the life and it would have been a shame to miss out on reading about it! Highly recommend!

I love E. Nesbit’s magical books so damn much. Five Children and It is a delight, though I think The Enchanted Castle might be my favourite, partly because the Ugly-Wuglies are utterly horrifying even now. Admittedly I’m more lukewarm about the non-magical ones (yes, sorry, even The Railway Children), but still. When I spotted this new biography of her on Netgalley, I immediately requested it.

I knew very little about Edith Nesbit before reading the book – the name of her husband and the fact that she was a founding member of the socialist Fabian Society, but that’s about it. This biography doesn’t go into details about the Fabian Society itself, which ends up giving the odd impression that it was a bit woolly and ineffectual, which is in fact the opposite of the truth. It concentrates more on her relationships with other members than on any activism she participated in. Of course, she was raising a gaggle of children (including two who were her husband’s mistress’s) as well as often being the financial mainstay of the household, so she probably didn’t have as much time for political activism as her husband and other members of the Society.

It was disappointing to discover that Edith opposed votes for women, despite the fact that many members of the Fabian Society were in favour. It seems that she trotted out the argument, still in vogue today, that fighting for the rights of a particular group will somehow harm everybody else, when in fact the opposite is usually true. I’m not angry… just disappointed! But that’s part of finding out about people; there’s always something upsetting.

There’s a lot of focus, as you might expect from a book titled The Life and Loves of…, on Edith’s relationships, friendly, romantic, and other. I’ll confess right now that after reading this biography I detest her husband, Hubert Bland. He sounds incredibly obnoxious with his sleeping around and his snobbery and his arrogance. Many of their friends seemed to feel that Edith as well as her husband enjoyed all the drama, but there’s a lot of other evidence that the marriage wasn’t particularly happy, and I can’t help feeling that perhaps she was creating a façade so that outsiders (and even she herself) would think that she was happy. I find it very telling that after she married her second husband, she commented that she’d never before felt completely loved by a man.

The majority of the aforementioned evidence comes from other people, especially family and friends. Edith herself wasn’t a journal keeper and although various letters are quoted, it seems that she either wasn’t such a prolific letter-writer as some folk, or few of her letters survived. She wrote about her childhood a few times, and a couple of those sources are extensively quoted, but otherwise she seems to have written relatively little that was directly biographical. Eleanor Fitzsimons frequently turns to Edith’s writing in an attempt to understand her feelings about people and events through the way she fictionalised them. It’s very interesting to see how many parallels there are between her life and her writings, though as an evidence-gathering exercise it is often inconclusive.

Despite this, a lot of people who knew Edith seem to have written or spoken about her. Her membership of the Fabian Society, as well as her gregarious nature and growing fame as a writer, meant that she met and knew many important people, all of whom had something to say about her. Eleanor Fitzsimons has obviously done a ton of research. Reading The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit, you do feel as though she knows pretty much everything there is to be known about Edith. It was interesting to see in her acknowledgements that the two previous biographies were so good that she wasn’t sure she could bring anything new. I guess she decided she could, and I’d love to know exactly what those new things were! Anyway, her research was clearly exhaustive and she has made excellent use of it.

It’s easy for a book that contains a lot of information to become dry and boring, but Eleanor Fitzsimons has a way of presenting Edith’s life story that is immensely readable. She goes into a fair amount of detail about certain people and events, but she’s always bringing up something new, or doing a little speculation, or breaking up mere facts with some parallel from Edith’s fiction. She has a way of painting people so that you feel you know them and of bringing events to life. By the end I was only eager to know more!

The only strange thing about this book was the way that footnotes are used, because there are two different sets. Those expanding on information given were marked by asterisks and placed at the end of each chapter, whereas those giving references for quotes and information were marked by numbers, and all those notes were at the end of the book. Yet the lines were blurred by expanding on information in some of the reference notes, and I can’t help thinking it would be simpler and more readable to have a single set of notes.

Although I’ve written an entire paragraph about it, that’s a very minor complaint. This was a very well-researched and well-written biography of E. Nesbit. It felt really comprehensive and was an excellent and easy read. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about this brilliant writer.

Thanks to Netgalley for the free ARC.

The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit is a detailed and fascinating biography of beloved children's author and poet E. Nesbit. Released 17th Oct 2019 by Duckworth Books, it's ~400 pages and available in ebook format (other editions may be available in other formats).

I remember growing up on a steady diet of weekend trips to the public library where, wonder of wonders, I could pick out ANY books I wanted. (I still get a thrill going into a library, more than half a century later). I discovered and devoured The Railway Children, The Psammead books, so many hours of delicious escapism and the ones she wrote, I revisited again and again. I felt then, and still feel, that she really understood how kids think and feel on some fundamental level. I think most readers of English have encountered her books at one point or another. I was previously unaware, however, except in the vaguest terms, anything whatever about her life.

This biography is meticulously researched, exhaustively annotated, and so well written. The author has a lyrical voice and at the same time a spare and respectful manner writing about her subject. Though precisely and minutely researched, it's anything but dull, and Ms. Fitzsimons doesn't shy away from covering the tragic parts of Nesbit's life.

I heartily recommend this one to anyone who enjoys biographies or has enjoyed Nesbit's oeuvre as a child (or grownup). This is a worthy biography of a worthy subject who isn't well represented in print currently.

Five stars.

I read E Nesbit as a child and loved her books. I read her as an adult and loved her books. I didn't know very much about her except what I learned from the fictionalised version of her life in the A S Byatt book. Her prose really stands the test of time. It's funny and perfectly pitched and I was really curious about the woman behind it all. The book is absolutely fascinating. The author has done considerable research and seems to have given an exhaustive account of her life without it being at all dull or dragging. I was. very sad to have finished it. An extraordinarily interesting book about an extraordinarily interesting woman.

Loved this biography that reads like an E. Nesbit story! It was delightful to discover so much about this incredible author.

Opening on the young Edith having the wind put up her by the mummies of Bordeaux, it's clear from the off that this will be no misty celebration of a much-loved children's author. Yes, the rural idyll is here, manifest both in the ones she experienced as a child herself and those she'd try to create for her own brood. But most writers who create paradises are reacting against experiences as much as they're recreating others, so we see also the hatred of school, and of change; the never quite forgotten loss of favourite friends and toys; the early bereavements. She lost her father early; he was a scientist whose own father had been a rather Gradgrindian-sounding educator, who disapproved of novels and Darwin both. Also a brother, who despite inventing the flower-dyeing process which enabled Wilde et al to wear their green carnations, spent a period in the workhouse before his premature demise; and a sister. The father and the sister, incidentally, both being buried very near me in the never quite fashionable catacombs of West Norwood (disappointingly, though Fitzsimons generally has an eye for the curious detail even where it's not strictly relevant, she does not mention the best feature of these, the hydraulic catafalque). This was one of several details that helped further invest me in the story – Devonshire Square, where I often sit at lunch, makes a brief appearance, and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs past which I commute turn out to have been a big influence on Nesbit.

The biggest presence in her life, though – and in some ways just as prehistoric a figure – is her terrible husband, Hubert Bland, one of those socialists with suspiciously convenient principles when it came to things like gender essentialism. Up for doing away with all obstacles to his being able to get his end away with all and sundry, yet convinced that women were at some fundamental level more suited to home and hearth, he is the archetype of every dreadful boyfriend of a far smarter, better-looking and generally just preferable female friend that you've ever met. Still, particularly in light of that abysmal recent attempt at a War Of The Worlds adaptation, smothered in half-understood approximations of sexual morality from Ye Olden Days, it's fascinating to compare and contrast the real thing, where a woman getting married seven months pregnant might mean a small-scale ceremony but was certainly no obstacle to a woman becoming a beloved children's author. Not that she was only that, of course; she saw herself first and foremost as a poet, though even for the late Victorians that didn't pay the bills, and just as MR James wrote a charming magical story for children which is now mostly forgotten, so Nesbit wrote her chilling horror stories too. On which this account does not stint, or at least no more than on the work in general, which very much takes a back seat to the title's life and loves, and when it does pop up tends to be read as veiled or reworked autobiography - as indeed does the work of those who knew the Blands, for instance Wells' New Machiavelli.

Wells is one of many literary figures to pop up in these pages, and plays a more central role than most – he would later describe the whole Bland menage as messy bitches who live for the drama (OK, I paraphrase, but barely), though his account may be coloured by their foiling his attempt to abscond with one of the daughters. On the other hand, he suggested that Hubert's lusts extended even to said daughter and he was rescuing her, so all one can safely conclude is: men! Certainly Hubert would later address a profoundly creepy book of his incredible thoughts to said daughter, advising her among other gems never to interrupt a man who was explaining something to her, even if she already knew it, because it would make her less attractive. Thanks, Hubert. Thubert. This is not the only time that sheer exasperation at Hubert Bland brings the story a curiously topical tone: when Edith, propelled largely by Hubert's predictably strong views on the matter, goes down like a lead balloon after doing a speech on why women shouldn't get the vote, one member of the audience explains that it was never going to go over well with a crowd of "waked-up" people. How little the terminology changes! And of course it's precisely Nesbit's own achievements, not to mention her own sizeable brood, that give the lie to the piffle she spouted in that speech, her notion that intellectual achievement in women led to 'sterility and race-death'.

It was that stance which would lead her to fall out with her old friend Laurence Housman, brother of AE, the latter making a brief cameo as Eeyore when he turns down a commission: "I suppose she already knows that I am morose and unamiable, and will not experience any sudden or agonising shock." AC Benson is another 'brother of the more famous' who keeps popping up, and the Chestertons are here too. More niche figures – though exciting ones for me – include Lord and Lady Dunsany (great enthusiasts for charades, apparently) and the ludicrous (and appallingly verminous) Fr. Rolfe. Wallis Budge advised her on Egyptian magic for The Story of the Amulet, and maybe more than that (though here as elsewhere, Fitzsimons hesitates to make a definite judgment on how far Nesbit's own extramarital flirtations went), and even in the diminished circumstances of her later life, her company was sought by Noel Coward, a fan of her work from infancy to his deathbed. She was there for the foundation of the Fabians, and indeed before it; it's somehow at once depressing and heartening to know that the left was just as prone to splittism and purity tests 140 years ago as today, and that despite this it has occasionally managed to get things done. I loved the line from their early manifesto stating "That the established Government has no more right to call itself the State than the smoke of London has to call itself the Weather". It was in these circles that Nesbit met George Bernard Shaw, with whom she also had some manner of inconclusive dalliance; odd outfit aside, he comes across here much as he did in The Mary Whitehouse Experience. Though in his defence, he did have the sense to point out - by analogy with his own background - how ludicrous were the snobbish assumptions underlying Nesbit's Baconian phase (and it didn't help that she'd got into her head that it could all be proved by logarithms, despite being so mathematically inept that at one point her big theory was relying on 41 being 4 x 13). William Morris was also an associate, though one who seems to have seen through Hubert better than most, and would doubtless have sympathised with Edith's observation that "It is curious that nearly all fortunes are made by turning beautiful things into ugly ones. Making beauty out of ugliness is very ill-paid work."

Nesbit's fortune wouldn't last, and in her lifetime at least her fame would also decline, but it's noticeable that even as her lot improved, her principles never faltered. I particularly liked the story of how the family would put on an entertainment for the poor children from a local school, but were outraged after the first one when they found out it had been used a prize for good behaviour, and thereafter insisted that all the children should come, not just those accounted virtuous by the staff, who tended to be the same sort of child Nesbit herself found a little wet. But against that, and her tendency to drop anti-capitalist propaganda into her stories, one must set her dislike for artists' renditions of her child characters which made them look like they might not be "children of gentle folk". As one friend summarised her: "She was a wonderful woman, large hearted, amazingly unconventional but with sudden strange reversions to ultra-respectable standards." But we have all our contradictions, and there are quotes from Nesbit's writing on the desperate shortages in poor schools, the joyless grind of their curriculum, which not so long ago one might have looked at and thought how far we'd come. Would that we could feel that way still, instead of looking longingly at her poem Two Voices:
"This is our vengeance day.
Our masters made fat with our fasting,
Shall fall before us like corn
When the sickle for harvest is strong."

As tends to be the way with biographies, the final chapters are a sad read, though there are some very moving passages about her second marriage, which she described as "a consolation prize for all sorts of failures" but which reads as a far better deal than the first. Still, the book ends on a lovely passage about the people who remain children at heart, which is too long to quote in full, too beautiful to abbreviate, but perfectly sums up the charm of her greatest books. Would I have liked a little more on Psammeads and Bastables? Perhaps, but I can always revisit them anyway, in their own stories, and this way I definitely have more of a picture of the fascinating, vexing milieu from which they sprang.

I loved The Railway Children and read it time and time again when I was young, so I was keen to read this biography. Edith Nesbit certainly had a fascinating life, but not an easy one, and I really enjoyed the book.



Fitzsimons has researched Edith's life thoroughly and provides an account which is extremely detailed and quite long, but never dull. She was a rather formidable woman who not only wrote children's books which are still highly regarded today, but also managed to provide for a large family, and actually do a lot to help poor children. She and her husband also belonged to a very intellectual and arty 'set,' which included such people as Shaw and Cyril Chesterton.



Probably, some readers in the 'Me Too' era will wonder why she put up with her handsome, but philandering husband, who even had some children with her friend. They lived in a strange 'menage a' trois' for a time. However, she seemed to be happy with him to some extent, and they were both rather bohemian Fabians with modern philosophies, such as free love and a belief in vegetarianism.



Fitzsimons analyses the background to Nesbit's books so this is a useful book to keep for those who want to read them again, or read them for the first time.



I received this free ebook from Net Galley in return for an honest review.

Fascinating book, the life of Edith Nesbit was interesting reading. She lived in fascinating times and knew so many of the key players, such as her self, of the time.

A very interesting biography of the famous children’s author of the beloved bookthr Railway Children .her life was very interesting .She-was a very interesting Woman who lived a life that was not always easy but very ifull.#netgalley #duckworthbooks

As someone who loved having my imagination whisked away by E E Nesbit’s books as a child, I was fascinated to read this biography. This well-known author turns out to have led an eventful – not always happily so – life and been a very interesting person with many views well in advance of her time. I was riveted, not just by the discovery of these facts but by the very clear, readable style of biographer Eleanor Fitzsimons. You never feel bogged down by facts about, for example, Nesbit’s involvement with the Fabian Society, and you never lose the sense of E E Nesbit as a person. She’s more than just the subject-matter of this book: she really does seem to live within its pages. You understand the assorted complex facets of her life that shaped her and her writing.
Fascinating and informative, this is a beautifully written biography. We mustn’t forget to praise the author of the book as well as the author who is its subject. Ms Fitzsimons has obviously done an enormous amount of research to put herself into Nesbit’s shoes and give us such a convincing portrayal of this literary giant’s life that is a pleasure to read.