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.
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, 1961.
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.
qtd. in
Briggs, Julia. A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924. Hutchinson, 1987.
389
Textual Production
Margery Lawrence
ML
's ghost stories have been frequently anthologised. They appear in, for instance, Fifty Strangest Stories Ever Told (1937), The Virago
Book of Ghost Stories: The Twentieth Century (1987), and Vampire Stories (1993).
Clute, John, and John, 1949 - Grant, editors. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. St Martin’s Press, 1997.
under Lawrence, Margery
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, 1 Sept.–30 Nov. 2011, pp. 17-19.
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.
Textual Production
Dorothy Boulger
A story by DB
provided the title for Dulcie's Lantern and Other Stories, a second collection of children's stories which she authored with Edith Nesbit
and others.
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.
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...
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...
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 Athenæum: Ungendered Anonymity Unmasked”. Nineteenth-Century Prose, Vol.
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
George Orwell
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, 1984.
326
of the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when...