BBC7

Edith Nesbit was born on 19th August 1858. She and her brothers and sisters were brought up in an agricultural college in London. The college was surrounded by a meadow where Edith and her siblings would often play.

Edith's father died when she was just four. The family remained in London for four more years, but then Edith was sent to boarding schools in first Brighton and then Stamford. She hated the schools very much and in September 1867, her mother agreed she could accompany her and her sisters, to France, where they travelled widely. Sadly, Edith's sister Mary died, and when Edith was fourteen they all returned to England. The family rented Halstead Hall in Kent, and this was the home where Edith and her brothers used to play near the railway line - a memory which became the inspiration for her book, "The Railway Children."

When she was seventeen, Edith and her mother moved to Islington in London and two years later she married the socialist writer, Hubert Bland. The couple had two children.

Edith was a regular lecturer and writer on socialist politics throughout the 1880s, but increasingly concentrated on her children's novels (see below). After the death of her husband she married an engineer, Thomas Tucker. But the time of her death on 4th May 1924.

E.Nesbit had published forty-four novels including:

• The Story of the Treasure-Seekers (1899)
• The Wouldbegoods (1901)
• Five Children and It (1902)
• The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904)
• The New Treasurer-Seekers (1904)
• The Railway Children (1906)
• The Enchanted Castle (1907)