Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) wrote more than sixty books for children under the name E. Nesbit, including Five Children and It and The Story of the Amulet. After a nomadic childhood—living for periods in London, Europe, and a country manor in Kent—Nesbit married a young Socialist businessman named Hubert Bland. Not long after the marriage, Bland became ill and his business floundered. Having written poetry in her teens, Nesbit found she could support her family by selling stories and poems to magazines and greeting-card companies. She did not experience true success, however, until the age of forty, when she began publishing novels for children. Throughout much of her life, Nesbit was at the center of a community of artists and political activists; both she and her husband were founding members, along with George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, of the Fabian Society, a Socialist group with close ties to Britain's Labour Party. Even in old age, Nesbit considered herself a child in an adult's body, writing in her autobiography that if others like her were "ever recognized for what they are, it is when they happen to have the use of their pens—when they write for and about children." »

The House of Arden

By E. Nesbit

The famous Arden family treasure has been missing for generations, and the last members of the Arden line, Edred, Elfrida, and their Aunt Edith, have nothing to their names but the crumbling castle they live in. Just before his tenth birthday, Edred inherits the title of Lord Arden; he also learns that the missing fortune will be his if—and only if—he can find it before he turns ten. With no time to lose, Edred and Elfrida secure the help of a magical talking creature, the temperamental Mouldiwarp, who leads them on a treasure hunt through the ages. Together, brother and sister visit some of the most thrilling periods of history and test their wits against real witches, highwaymen, and renegades. They find plenty of adventure, but will they find the treasure before Edred's birthday?

Reviews

[Nesbit] was the first to write at length for children as intellectual equals and in their own language....[Her books] took place in contemporary England, and recommended socialist solutions to its problems; they presented a modern view of childhood; and they used magic both as a comic device and as a serious metaphor for the power of the imagination....Her full-length books are full of girls who are as brave and adventurous as their brothers; and even in her more conventional short fairy tales, the heroines never sit around waiting to be rescued.
— Alison Lurie, The New York Review of Books

After Lewis Carroll, E. Nesbit is the best of the English fabulists who wrote about children and like Carroll she was able to create a world of magic and inverted logic that was entirely her own.
— Gore Vidal

I love E. Nesbit—I think she is great and I identify with the way that she writes. Her children are very real children and she was quite a groundbreaker in her day.
— J.K. Rowling

A good case could be made for E. Nesbit as the best writer for children ever.
— The Washington Post Book World

[Nesbit] could present everyday people caught up in supernatural situations just as naturally as she permits the realistic details of everyday life to obtrude into her world of fantasy.
— The Horn Book

For many readers—H.G. Wells and Laurence Housman, G.K. Chesterton upon any and Noel Coward—for these and thousands more, the most magical stories of modern times are those by that Edwardian wizard E. Nesbit...To come upon any Nesbit today, hitherto unread,...is like receiving a letter from a friend whom you have believed dead.... It doesn't really matter what her children do, they are real children, quite self-sufficient, almost always very funny...
— Leo Lerman, The New York Times

Also see:

Beyond Harry Potter Collection Charlotte Sometimes, The House of Arden, Mistress Masham's Repose, and The Wind on the Moon

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