Edith Nesbit is a biographers dream. Mrs Bland, as she was known for most of her life (a misnomer if ever there was one), was one of the great childrens writers, responsible for The Railway Children, the Bastable series (which included The Wouldbegoods) and the Psammead series, in which a bad-tempered sand fairy livens up the novels Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet.

Its not just that Nesbits books are brilliant: her life is also brilliant material for one. She was in person at once quite awe-inspiring and a bit of a nightmare, able to weather tragedy and yet a queen of melodrama, a self-supporting writer who opposed womens suffrage. Vibrantly attractive and adored by her many proteges and readers, she was what they called in those days advanced a committed socialist (she and her husband Hubert Bland were among the earliest members of the Fabian Society) who wore free-flowing clothes, gave charitably and wrote ferociously against poverty, and let her children play barefoot in the garden. Her home at Well Hall, in Eltham, was a lively hub for young writers, artists and Fabians; a place, HG Wells recalled, to which one rushed down from town at the week-end to snatch ones bed before anyone else got it. She was generous with her time, her money and her husband.

Nesbit put her success down to being one of those people who feel that they are children in a grown-up world; her stories certainly read as if written for equals. In the Psammead novels, there is a delightful mix of the recognisable Camden Town, the British Museum and the magical; it is as if by grounding her fiction firmly in a real world, Nesbit makes the fantasy seem all the more tantalisingly possible. In her readable and thorough biography, Eleanor Fitzsimons presents a real life of high drama and storytelling.

Nesbits own childhood was largely happy but nomadic. Her father, a distinguished chemist and teacher, died in 1862 when Edith was three, and from then the family moved around in reduced circumstances, taking regular trips abroad to cope with the ill health of an older sister, Mary, who died young. In 1880, the 21-year-old Edith married Bland, then a bank clerk. He was tall and athletic, powerful seeming. The description left by George Bernard Shaw, a close friend of the couple during their early marriage, makes Bland sound like a bully; nevertheless he was popular with women. He had already impregnated one fiancee by the time they met. Nesbit herself was seven months pregnant when they married; their son, Paul, was born that summer. Two more children, Iris and Fabian, followed. Bland was never good with money; Nesbit supported the family by writing and by decorating greetings cards.

It seems little surprise that her novels tend to feature hardworking mothers battling in the background to keep the family afloat. Fitzsimons makes this connection and her book is interesting in showing how Nesbits lifelong socialist principles found expression in her childrens books. Yet perhaps the biographer is too insistent on drawing links between the life and the fiction. It is true that Nesbits characters are often semi-orphans, but then any childrens writer worth their salt knows that absent, or at least supremely negligent, parents are a prerequisite for a decent adventure. Fitzsimons does not always allow for the complex workings of fantasy, craft and imagination in the fiction elements that are just as relevant, one suspects, in Nesbits approach to life.

The household was apparently always embroiled in scenes; its hard to tell what was for show and what was suffering. Shortly after Iriss birth, Nesbit discovered that Blands relationship with his previous fiancee was still going on (she had no idea about Edith). On his nights away from home, Nesbits friend, Alice Hoatson, kept her company. When a devastated Nesbit suffered a stillbirth, it was Hoatson who had to prise the dead baby from her arms; before long she had moved in permanently. They told people she had joined them because she was seriously ill; in fact she was heavily pregnant. Nesbit agreed to raise the child, a girl named Rosamund, as her own. It is unclear when she discovered that Bland was the babys father. Rosamund would later claim that Nesbit only found out six months after the birth and would have thrown the pair out if Bland hadnt threatened to leave with them. Others assumed that Nesbit had always known and may even have engineered the affair to get her husband away from a lover she disliked. She had her own intense romantic friendships Shaw being one yet Fitzsimons concludes that these were probably platonic. After all, she notes drily, Bland held women to a high moral standard.

She suspects his views were also behind Nesbits stance on female suffrage. (Blands opinion: Votes for Women? Votes for children! Votes for dogs!) She once delivered a speech titled Natural Disabilities of Women to an appalled audience of the Fabian Womens Group, which had invited her to speak on women and work. And yet work she did, writing more than 40 books. Its one of the odd contradictions that Fitzsimons wisely does not attempt to resolve: that this bright, talented woman would cling to deeply traditional ideas about her place and vulnerabilities, and was apparently in thrall to a bullish hypocrite. Or perhaps she was engaged in a bold experiment in living. Another way of understanding the menage a trois between Bland, Nesbit and Hoatson (who would have a second child with Bland, a son they pretended was Nesbits) is as a fruitful and longlasting collaboration between the two women. Nesbit was already an acclaimed poet by the time her childrens stories, often serialised in the Strand magazine, began to improve the familys fortunes. The first Bastable book, The Story of the Treasure Seekers, appeared in 1899. The still-precarious family finances depended on Bland and Nesbit (they sometimes collaborated) churning out articles, stories and novels. Hoatsons management of the home and children freed Nesbit to create. She generally set the tone. Her moods could plunge the whole household into gloom just as she enlivened everything when she was happy. Most agreed that Nesbit and Bland thrived on all the drama.

But in 1900, the family came to grief when 15-year-old Fabian died after an operation to remove his adenoids. The whole episode puts the grown-ups in a bad light. Nesbit seems to have forgotten that the doctor was even coming: she had to be roused from her bed when he arrived at 11am to perform the procedure. Its possible that Fabian hadnt been warned not to eat beforehand an omission that may have caused his death. Nesbit was, Fitzsimons writes, demented with grief. She threw herself into work and her popularity grew. Take a book by E Nesbit into any family of boys and girls, a contemporary noted, and they fall upon it like wolves.

Sarah Watlings Noble Savages: The Olivier Sisters is published by Cape. The Life and Loves of E Nesbit is published by Duckworth (20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over 15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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The Life and Loves of E Nesbit review melodrama and menage a trois - The Guardian