The young Noel Coward thought E. Nesbit was 'the most genuine Bohemian I had ever seen'. Berta Ruck called her 'the Duchess'. Nesbit set herself up as the complete Edwardian: a free-thinker, a matriarch and a madcap. She bobbed her hair, carried her tobacco in a corset box, and acquiesced in her Fabian husband's disdain for the suffragettes: 'Votes for women? ... Votes for dogs!' She wrote feeble verses which she prized, and robust books for children which made her famous. Like many successful writers of fiction for the young, she produced unhappy offspring: she was not wild about children; she was transfixed by the idea of herself as a child.

LRB 18 February 1988 | PDF Download