Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
E. Nesbit
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Standard Name: Nesbit, E.
Birth Name: Edith Nesbit
Nickname: Daisy
Indexed Name: E. Nesbit
Married Name: Edith Bland
Pseudonym: Ethel Mortimer
Pseudonym: Fabian Bland
Married Name: Edith Tucker
EN
, writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, was an immensely prolific poet, journalist, novelist, and occasionally a playwright, who is remembered today almost entirely for her enduringly popular story-books for children (which number about forty). Her children's books are highly imaginative and full of fun. They involve their child protagonists in encounters, often magical, with worlds beyond their own: not only in literary, historical, and fantasy encounters, but also in those which raise social and political issues in terms that children can understand. Her writing for adults includes novels, poetry, short stories, plays, magazine contributions and editing, political commentary, and everything that might possibly be undertaken by a hard-up woman of letters.
This is one of the several pieces in which Orwell champions the middlebrow or non-art writing. His supreme example
Orwell, George. The Penguin Essays of George Orwell. Penguin in association with Secker and Warburg.
326
of the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Augusta Webster
During her tenure she encountered the very best and worst of late Victorian poetry. Her published reviews, which critic Marysa Demoor
characterises as expressing a hesitant modernism,
Demoor, Marysa. “Women Poets as Critics in the <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘j’>Athenæum</span>: Ungendered Anonymity Unmasked”. Nineteenth-Century Prose, Vol.
SH
gives free rein to her enjoyment of list-making. Writers mentioned (not in a list or lists) include E. Nesbit
(read by Noel Coward on his deathbed), Pamela Hansford Johnson
and her husband C. P. Snow
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Berta Ruck
She relates her birth and childhood in India, her years in college, and a holiday in France with E. Nesbit
and other artist friends. She also discusses her feelings about her writing career, her...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Marghanita Laski
The book aims at literary recuperation. Here ML
blends analysis with celebration, but she recalls her marginalised writers primarily to raise questions about the present state of writing for children. She says that her subjects...
Textual Production
Noel Streatfeild
NS
published The Fearless Treasure, A Story of England from Then to Now, which (contrary to her usual habit but like well-known books by E. Nesbit
and Rudyard Kipling
) carries present-day children back into history.
Wilson, Barbara Ker. Noel Streatfeild. Bodley Head.
27
Textual Production
Berta Ruck
BR
published a novel entitled The Arrant Rover, which E. Nesbit
liked best of any I have read of yours.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Briggs, Julia. A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924. Hutchinson.
“May Crommelin (Maria Henriette de la Cherois-Crommelin) (1849 - 1930)”. Crommelin Family, The Netherlands.
On 30 January 1895 (as Over the Andes, from Argentine to Chile and Peru began the serialization that ran all year) she contributed A Water Horse...
Textual Production
Noel Streatfeild
Besides fiction, NS
wrote adult short stories, plays, scripts for radio and television series, and in 1958 a critical biography of E. Nesbit
. Her social work involved her in giving speeches and lectures.
Jones, Amanda Jane. “A fragment of the Blitz: Noel Streatfeild’s wartime diary”. Women’s History Magazine, No. 67, pp. 17-19.
It seems unquestionable that this story is somehow related to E. Nesbit
's The Town in the Library in the Town in the Library, published the following year; but since the actual composition of...
Textual Production
Dorothy Boulger
DB
and Edith Nesbit
published their first collection of children's stories, Twice Four, in London.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Timeline
January 1888: The Star was launched as a radical evening...
Writing climate item
January 1888
The Star was launched as a radical evening paper in London.
4 February 1888: Annie Besant and W.T. Stead edited the first...
1964: When Julia Ballam (an undergraduate at St...
Building item
1964
When Julia Ballam
(an undergraduate at St Hilda's College, Oxford
, who later became the scholar Julia Briggs) got pregnant, the college stripped her of her scholarship, but more remarkably for this date they did...
1977: The Guardian Award for Children's Books went...
Women writers item
1977
The Guardian Award for Children's Books went to Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones
, about an ambitious young enchantress holed up in a castle,
Ashby, Melanie. “Diana Wynne Jones”. Mslexia, No. 26, pp. 46-8.
48
which, she says, revisits the trope of the isolated...
Texts
Nesbit, E. A Pomander of Verse. John Lane, 1895.
Nesbit, E. Ballads and Lyrics of Socialism, 1883-1908. Fabian Society; A. C. Fifield, 1908.
Nesbit, E. Daphne in Fitzroy Street. George Allen and Sons, 1909.
Nesbit, E. Dormant. Methuen, 1911.
Boulger, Dorothy, and E. Nesbit. Dulcie’s Lantern and Other Stories. Griffith, Farran, 1895.
Nesbit, E., and H. R. Millar. Five Children and It. T. Fisher Unwin, 1902.
Nesbit, E. Grim Tales. A. D. Innes, 1893.
Nesbit, E., and H. R. Millar. Harding’s Luck. Hodder and Stoughton, 1909.
Nesbit, E. Lays and Legends. Longmans, Green, 1886.
Nesbit, E. et al. Long Ago When I Was Young. Whiting and Wheaton, 1966.
Nesbit, E. Many Voices. Hutchinson, 1922.
Nesbit, E. et al. New Treasure Seekers. T. Fisher Unwin, 1904.
Nesbit, E., and Gerald Spencer Pryse. Salome and the Head. Alston Rivers, 1909.
Nesbit, E. Something Wrong. A. D. Innes, 1893.
Nesbit, E. Songs of Love and Empire. A. Constable, 1898.
Nesbit, E., and H. R. Millar. The House of Arden. T. Fisher Unwin, 1908.
Nesbit, E. The Incredible Honeymoon. Harper and Brothers, 1916.
Nesbit, E. The Lark. Hutchinson, 1922.
Nesbit, E., and H. R. Millar. The Magic City. Macmillan, 1910.
Nesbit, E. et al., editors. The Neolith.
Nesbit, E., and H. R. Millar. The Phoenix and the Carpet. G. Newnes, 1904.
Nesbit, E. The Pilot.
Nesbit, E., and Hubert Bland. The Prophet’s Mantle. Henry Drane, 1888.
Nesbit, E., and Charles Edmund Brock. The Railway Children. Wells, Gardner, Darton, 1906.
Nesbit, E. The Rainbow and the Rose. Longmans, Green, 1905.