![]() ![]() She never got over this loss: the theme of absent parents recurs in her books. But when Edith was four, her adored father died suddenly. ![]() ![]() Her life began conventionally enough in 1858, the youngest of six children brought up in middle-class comfort in a large house in a pocket of countryside in South London. ![]() Yet Edith’s domestic setup was wilder and more extraordinary than any of her tales, as a new biography by Elisabeth Galvin reveals. Edith Nesbit – who wrote as E Nesbit – remains one of the most popular children’s authors of all time, with millions passing on their love of her magical, wonderfully innocent stories to their own children. She was the author of such timeless books as The Railway Children, Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet – wholesome childhood adventures often set in the English countryside in a time of steam trains and straw boaters, complete with buns for tea, saintly mothers and devoted fathers. She spent most of her adult years embroiled in a ménage à trois, married to a man who had 15 other affairs, and had her own lovers from the bohemian literary set. Her books were the epitome of childhood innocence, but E Nesbit’s own life was anything but. ![]()
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