The author and activist Edith Nesbit was born on 15 August 1858. This Thursday marks her birthday.
Nesbit’s father died when she was three years old and her childhood was spent pursuing warm weather around Europe with her mother and her sister Mary, who was dying of tuberculosis. After Mary’s death, Edith settled in London and in 1880 she married a strapping bank clerk named Hubert Bland, an unhappy marriage that got off to a bad start when Edith discovered that another woman believed she was Hubert’s fiancée and already had a child by him.
Nesbit became a bestselling author of children’s novels. “Take a book by E. Nesbit into any family of boys and girls,” wrote one contemporary, “and they fall upon it like wolves.” She was a keen admirer of the artist and socialist William Morris and became a founding member of the Fabian Society in 1884. She edited the society’s journal Today and in 1885 she named her third child Fabian.
To celebrate Nesbit’s birthday, you could read one of her classic and much loved children’s books, such as The Railway Children, Five Children and It or The Phoenix and the Carpet, but I recommend trying her sinister stories for adults, which were collected in a beautiful Handheld Classics edition that came out in May this year.
In particular I recommend a deliciously creepy 1887 story called ‘Man-Size in Marble’, which opens in the month of August. It’s about a newly-wed couple who come to live in a little coastal cottage, built on the ruins of a much older house . . .
Here is an extract from the first few pages:
I used to paint in those days, and Laura used to write, and we felt sure we could keep the pot at least simmering. Living in town was out of the question, so we went to look for a cottage in the country, which should be at once sanitary and picturesque. So rarely do these two qualities meet in one cottage that our search was for some time quite fruitless. We tried advertisements, but most of the desirable rural residences which we did look at proved to be lacking in both essentials, and when a cottage chanced to have drains it always had stucco as well and was shaped like a tea-caddy. And if we found a vine or rose-covered porch, corruption invariably lurked within. Our minds got so befogged by the eloquence of house-agents and the rival disadvantages of the fever-traps and outrages to beauty which we had seen and scorned, that I very much doubt whether either of us, on our wedding morning, knew the difference between a house and a haystack. But when we got away from friends and house-agents, on our honeymoon, our wits grew clear again, and we knew a pretty cottage when at last we saw one. It was at Brenzett—a little village set on a hill over against the southern marshes. We had gone there, from the seaside village where we were staying, to see the church, and two fields from the church we found this cottage. It stood quite by itself, about two miles from the village. It was a long, low building, with rooms sticking out in unexpected places. There was a bit of stone-work—ivy-covered and moss-grown, just two old rooms, all that was left of a big house that had once stood there—and round this stone-work the house had grown up. Stripped of its roses and jasmine it would have been hideous. As it stood it was charming, and after a brief examination we took it. It was absurdly cheap. The rest of our honeymoon we spent in grubbing about in second-hand shops in the county town, picking up bits of old oak and Chippendale chairs for our furnishing. We wound up with a run up to town and a visit to Liberty’s, and soon the low oak-beamed lattice-windowed rooms began to be home. There was a jolly old-fashioned garden, with grass paths, and no end of hollyhocks and sunflowers, and big lilies. From the window you could see the marsh-pastures, and beyond them the blue, thin line of the sea. We were as happy as the summer was glorious, and settled down into work sooner than we ourselves expected. I was never tired of sketching the view and the wonderful cloud effects from the open lattice, and Laura would sit at the table and write verses about them, in which I mostly played the part of foreground.
We got a tall old peasant woman to do for us. Her face and figure were good, though her cooking was of the homeliest; but she understood all about gardening, and told us all the old names of the coppices and cornfields, and the stories of the smugglers and highwaymen, and, better still, of the “things that walked,” and of the “sights” which met one in lonely glens of a starlight night. She was a great comfort to us, because Laura hated housekeeping as much as I loved folklore, and we soon came to leave all the domestic business to Mrs. Dorman, and to use her legends in little magazine stories which brought in the jingling guinea.
We had three months of married happiness, and did not have a single quarrel. One October evening I had been down to smoke a pipe with the doctor—our only neighbour—a pleasant young Irishman. Laura had stayed at home to finish a comic sketch of a village episode for the Monthly Marplot. I left her laughing over her own jokes, and came in to find her a crumpled heap of pale muslin weeping on the window seat.
“Good heavens, my darling, what’s the matter?” I cried, taking her in my arms. She leaned her little dark head against my shoulder and went on crying. I had never seen her cry before—we had always been so happy, you see—and I felt sure some frightful misfortune had happened.
“What is the matter? Do speak.”
“It’s Mrs. Dorman,” she sobbed.
“What has she done?” I inquired, immensely relieved.
“She says she must go before the end of the month, and she says her niece is ill; she’s gone down to see her now, but I don’t believe that’s the reason, because her niece is always ill. I believe someone has been setting her against us. Her manner was so queer—”
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I had no idea that Nesbit, whose fantasies for children I’ve read and loved, also wrote creepy tales for adults. This passage has a Shirley Jackson vibe. I must find the book. Thank you.