Edith Nesbit — a children’s writer of genius who disinherited her own adopted offspring

‘When one writes for children,’ the novelist Jill Paton Walsh has said, ‘there are more people in the room. Writing for children involves the adult writer, and the child that writer once was; the present child reader, and the adult that child will become.’

Edith Nesbit, one of the greatest writers for children, was brilliantly attentive to this quartet. What she remembered clearly was childhood’s capacity for belief. At the moment when, in Five Children and It, the Psammead emerges from the sand, she comments: ‘It is wonderful how quickly you get used to things, even the most astonishing.’ In The Phoenix and the Carpet those same children find a mythical bird in their fireplace. They are ‘hardly astonished at all’.

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Nesbit’s fairies and phoenices — how’s that for a pedantic plural? — are discovered not in a topsy-turvy Wonderland or a moral allegory but in a pet shop in Camden Town or a room in a suburban villa.