Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
E. Nesbit
-
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.
The Daisy Chain's popularity was long-lasting, though not so intense as that of The Heir of Redclyffe. Jane Austen
's nephew James Austen-Leigh
compared it to the work of Austen and Scott
...
Family and Intimate relationships
Fay Weldon
During her marriage she and Edgar entertained the literary and avant-garde world: she later regaled her grand-daughter with irreverent stories of Joseph Conrad
, Jean Rhys
(Such a louche young woman),
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.
BW
and her husband
founded the leftist journal the New Statesman, under the auspices of the Fabian Society
; this month Clifford Sharp
became editor, which he remained until 1930. The first number appeared...
RMW
's leadership and personal aesthetics steered the periodical towards the arts, while still keeping intact established columns on domestic topics, such as gardening, needlework, cookery and fashion.
Hughes, Linda K. “A Female Aesthete at the Helm: Sylvia’s Journal and ’Graham R. Tomson’, 1893-1894”. Victorian Periodical Review, Vol.
29
, No. 2, pp. 173-92.
175
Pages teemed with poetry and fiction...
Reception
Rosamund Marriott Watson
RMW
's retirement from Sylvia's Journal did not hinder her growing literary reputation. In April 1894 she was featured (as Graham R. Tomson and with a flattering photograph) alongside E. Nesbit
, Christina Rossetti
,...
Publishing
Rosamund Marriott Watson
The book is dedicated with affection and esteem
Watson, Rosamund Marriott. The Art of the House. G. Bell and Sons.
prelims
to art critic and professor R. A. M. Stevenson
(cousin of the famous novelist). Earlier versions of the essays had appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette...
Archer, William. Poets of the Younger Generation. John Lane, Bodley Head.
vii-viii
Her diction is pure, he...
Friends, Associates
Ethel Lilian Voynich
Back in London, Ethel Lilian Boole was further pulled into revolutionary causes after her friend Charlotte Wilson
(then an anarchist journalist, later a leader of the Fabian Women's Group
) introduced her to exiles Sergei Kravchinskii
After languishing for more than a century, HET
's work has reappeared in the anthology of Victorian women poets edited by Angela Leighton
and Margaret Reynolds
.Leighton compares her unsentimenal poems on childbirth and motherhood...
Publishing
Flora Thompson
The idea of FT
's next regular outlet for short fiction, the The Catholic Fireside, may have been suggested to her by A. Brodie Frazer
, a journalist on the Daily News who apparently...
Education
Elizabeth Taylor
Betty Coles's first reading was Beatrix Potter
, then Lewis CarrollAlice in Wonderland and E. Nesbit
, whose Bastable stories she read over and over again. Though her parents were not bookish people she progressed at...
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.