The Life and Loves of E Nesbit, by Eleanor Fitzsimons

The Life and Loves of E Nesbit By Eleanor Fitzsimons Duckworth £20

In 1923, a year before the death of the writer and Fabian Socialist Edith Nesbit, her fellow writer and close friend Berta Ruck paid a visit to her last home, a pair of converted brick-built huts on Romney Marsh in Essex.

Nesbit lived there with her second husband, a retired seaman, Tommy Tucker.

Ruck, describing the occasion, is shocked at how the once robust, statuesque Nesbit has been altered by illness and impoverishment, and yet ‘they stood out, those freckles on pale skin like a challenge from another century’s ardent and arduous summers’.

‘Ardent and arduous’ are fitting words to attach to Nesbit’s rich and complicated life. She was a committed poet who found her greatest fame in publishing the children’s books that featured families based on her own boisterous, complicated household. She was an ‘advanced’ woman, in flowing clothes with cropped hair, who rolled her own cigarettes, was a founder member of the Fabian Society but fiercely opposed women’s suffrage. She was a tireless campaigner and fundraiser for disadvantaged children. The family breadwinner, she tolerated the many love affairs of her husband Hubert Bland, to the extent of adopting two of his children – whom she then left out of her will.

This is the first major biography of Nesbit for more than 30 years and is as lively and busy as Nesbit must have been in person, if distractedly uneven for a supposedly chronological work. It opens rather incongruously on a lengthy scene in which six-year-old Edith (known as ‘Daisy’ by her family) visits a crypt in Bordeaux containing 70 mummified corpses. This unsettling experience affected Nesbit for the rest of her life, and found its way into first her early Gothic stories and then her fantasy novels for children.

Edith Nesbit was born in 1858 in Kennington, London, where her father, John, ran an agricultural college. Its garden, lusciously recalled in Nesbit’s non-fiction book Wings and the Child, or the Building of Magic Cities (1913), was the first of many gardens to feature in Nesbit’s life and in her works. She was a lyrical interpreter of the natural world, often shying just short of purple prose – a habit shared by her biographer.

Just before Edith turned four, ‘tragedy blighted her life’ (Fitzsimons is fond of iterations of this phrase, and in one instance uses it twice in the same paragraph) with the death of John Nesbit. The character Bobbie’s loss of and reunion with her father in The Railway Children (1906) remains one of the most personal and heart-rending in children’s literature.

Edith ran away from several boarding schools; she had her first poem published at 16. The early separation from her father and later bereavements – an older sister dying of tuberculosis, a stillbirth, and the preventable death, in 1900, of her 15-year-old son, Fabian Bland, following a tonsil operation – are detailed here, as are the back stories

of many of the minor figures wh0 populate the book.

Fitzsimons appears more interested in these tangential characters than in, for example, Alice Hoatson. Hoatson was originally a friend of Nesbit’s and housekeeper/nanny to her three children, and remained part of the family after becoming Bland’s mistress and the unacknowledged mother of two more children. She effectively ran the chaotic, bohemian household, based in Eltham, south London. That left Nesbit free to write and to collaborate with younger male admirers on various literary and philanthropic projects.

None of this is new material, and it often reads as though being rushed through – but Fitzsimons does pause to draw memorable portraits of fellow Fabians Shaw and Wells. Wells’s seduction of Rosamund Bland (Hoatson’s daughter) led to a breach with both Mr and Mrs Bland – whom he went on to caricature as the insufferable Mr and Mrs Boole in The New Machiavelli (1910).

Fitzsimons is good, too, at portraying the world of literary hacks of which both Nesbit and Bland were a central part; and capturing Nesbit’s cool head for business deals and her gifts as an entrepreneur. During the First World War, she kept the household afloat by setting up as a poultry breeder.