Author. Edith Nesbit was an English writer and poet, who published at least 60 successful books for children using the name "E. Nesbit." Nesbit's father died when she was three, but her mother was of a strong character, who persevered and cared for the family. Her mother continued the agricultural college, which her father and grandfather had founded in Kennington. With her older sister Mary's battle with tuberculous, the family would travel to France, Germany and Spain, and it was there she received her education in boarding schools. Eventually, her sister died young, her mother remarried, and she gained a half-sister and 3 half-brothers. The family returned to England when Nesbit was seventeen. In 1876, Nesbit published her first story in the "Sunday Magazine." At the age of nineteen she met a bank clerk, Hubert Bland, who would become her husband and converting her to Socialism. She was one of the founders of the association known as the Fellowship of New Life, which developed into the Fabian Society, a British organization associated with left-wing liberal politics and later became part of the Labor Party. She and her husband edited the Socialist Magazine, "Today" and collaborated with H.G. Wells on the novel "The Prophet's Mantle", which was published in 1885. The Bland-Nesbit marriage proved to be an unconventional and opened, with her husband's publicly-known extra-marital relationships and children born as the results. She had four children but adopted two children fathered by her husband. Her fourth child was stillborn and her son Fabian died at age 15 from the complication of surgery. In an era when women were not the "bread winner" of an English household, she was a self-supporting author, yet opposed women's suffrage. Not a good money manager, she gave her time and money to support young writers, artists and other Fabians in her bohemian literary home. Her husband slowly became blind. After her husband's 1914 death at the age of 45, she was granted a civil-list pension in 1915 for her services to literature and remarried in 1917 to Tommy Tucker. She moved from the city to the countryside in Kent in 1922. She started a new genre of literature of magical adventures arising from everyday settings, which has been much imitated. Nesbit is most famous for her fictional literature for children, which included "The Story of the Treasure-Seekers" in 1899; "The Wouldbegoods" in 1901, which was dedicated to her son Fabian; "Five Children and It" in 1902; "The Phoenix and the Carpet" in 1904; "The Railway Children" in 1906, which was adapted to a film in 1970; and "The Enchanted Castle" in 1907. Nesbit also wanted to be taken seriously as a poet. She would produce a book of collected poetry called the "Ballads and Lyrics of Socialism: 1883 to 1908." Her three biographies are "E Nesbit" in 1933 by Doris Langley Moor, "A Woman of Passion" by Julia Briggs in 1987, and "The Life and Loves of E. Nesbit: Author of The Railway Children" by Eleanor Fitzsimons in 2020, which received the Rubery Book Award for 2020 and a "Sunday Times" Best Book of the Year. Her original wooden grave marker was handmade by her husband but was later replaced in stone by the Edith Nesbit Society with the original one being placed on the wall within the church.