E. Nesbit

Edith Nesbit was born in Kennington, south London, on 15 August 1858. Her father, who ran an agricultural college, died when she was three, and her mother took the family around England, France and Germany in search of a cure for Edith’s older sister’s tuberculosis. Edith went to a series of schools she mostly hated. In 1880, already pregnant, she married Hubert Bland, a charming, unreliable bank clerk who soon proved to be a serial philanderer. The household eventually included two of his children by another woman, whom Nesbit raised as her own.

For years she supported the family more or less by herself, writing poems, stories, journalism and anything else that would sell. She and Bland were among the founders of the Fabian Society in 1884, the socialist group that later included George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. Her real success came late, with children’s books: The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899), Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Railway Children (1906). Their wit and their matter-of-fact treatment of magic shaped children’s fantasy for the next century. After Bland’s death she married a ship’s engineer, Thomas Tucker. She died on 4 May 1924 at St Mary’s Bay, on Romney Marsh in Kent, and is buried at nearby St Mary in the Marsh.

Before the children’s books, Nesbit wrote a good number of horror stories for adults, many collected in Grim Tales (1893). Both stories on this site come from that book. Man-Size in Marble (1887) is set in Brenzett, a real village on the edge of Romney Marsh, where a young artist and his wife rent a cottage near a church. Their housekeeper warns them that the marble knights on the church’s tombs don’t stay put on All Saints’ Eve. John Charrington's Wedding (1891) is shorter, about a young man who swears to the woman he loves that he’ll come to their wedding, dead or alive.

“Man-Size in Marble” is the one to read first, and it is a good Halloween choice. It’s set on the night of 31 October.