A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit - Softcover

Briggs, Julia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566633761 ISBN 13: 9781566633765

Publisher: New Amsterdam Books, 2000

Synopsis

In A Woman of Passion, Julia Briggs chronicles the life of author Edith Nesbit who is credited with being the first modern writer for children and the creator of the children's adventure story. Nesbit recorded her life with varying degrees of honesty in verse and prose, and while she seldom wrote entirely openly of her own experiences, she seldom wrote convincingly of anything else. In this fascinating read, Julia Briggs attempts to fill in the gaps of Nesbit's autobiographical material, painting an intriguing portrait of the famous author.

About this title

About the Author:

E. Nesbit is one of the great children's writers of the century. Though known in her day for her poems, short stories, and novels, she is now remembered as the author of The Railway Children, The Treasure Seekers, Five Children and It, and many other stories of magic and adventure that are still triumphantly in print. Her readers loved to think of her as reassuringly maternal, but this biography reveals her as a strong-minded, adventurous woman.

From Publishers Weekly:

Readers will find British children's writer Edith Nesbit a woman of contradictions, at once impetuous and generous in her friendships, alternately complacent and irritable as a wife, and simultaneously caring and distant as a mother. Hubert Bland, Nesbit's first husband, married her in the eighth month of her pregnancy with his child but did not end what would become his 10-year-long affair with another woman; Alice Hoatson lived with the Blands most of her life and bore two children by Hubert, both quietly adopted by Edith. Briggs expands on what is known of Nesbit's affair with G. B. Shaw, and her friendship and friction with H. G. Wellshis attempt to seduce one of her daughters and his theft, in Edith's eyes, of her time-travel ideas. Supporting the family by churning out pulp-magazine stories, she didn't begin to write for children until she was 40. An "emancipated" woman, she was a founder of the Fabian Society, cropped her hair and wore unshapely gowns, allowed her children to run barefoot and wild, and surrounded herself with adoring young men. After Bland died, she married a ferry boat captain several stations beneath her in class and found happiness selling fruits and vegetables with him. Briggs, an Oxford tutor, darts back and forth among people, events and places that shaped Nesbit's life and writings, giving this biography its complicated, yet revealing, form. Not only is this a well-documented, scholarly venture but a completely absorbing tale, seamlessly told and almost too wickedly entertaining for belief. Photos.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: New Amsterdam Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1566633761
• ISBN 13: 9781566633765
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 510