Mary and two of the other children, including Edith, to the warmer climate of France. The Nesbits travel throughout the country, never remaining in one place for long.
1868 The first part of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women appears.
1870 The Nesbit family moves to a Brittany farmhouse; the children are allowed to roam freely. A reluctant Edith is sent to various boarding schools and at one point a convent in Germany. Sarah Nesbit takes Mary back to London, where Mary becomes engaged to Philip Bourke Marston, a poet who is a member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle.
1871 In November, Mary Nesbit dies. George MacDonald publishes At the Back of the North Wind. Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There appears.
1872 The Nesbits settle in Kent, renting Halstead Hall, where the children find many diversions, including railroad tracks that run through the property. Edith enters a period of great happiness. MacDonald’s most enduring book for children, The Princess and the Goblin, is released.
1875 Edith’s first published poems appear in a local paper, the Sunday Magazine. The family moves back to London.
1876 Mark Twain publishes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
1877 Edith meets Hubert Bland, a young writer and political activist.
1880 Hubert Bland and Edith Nesbit are married. Their first child, Paul, is born two months later.
1881 A second child, Iris, is born.
1882 Nesbit meets Alice Hoatson, who will have an ongoing affair with Bland.
1883 Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson publishes Treasure Island. George MacDonald publishes The Princess and Curdie.
1884 Bland and Nesbit help found the Fabian Society, a circle of progressive intellectuals committed to gradual social change through democratic reform. Nesbit is invited to write pamphlets for the group. The society attracts notable figures, including writers George Bernard Shaw and, later, H. G. Wells. Nesbit also adopts the image of the so-called New Woman of the late nineteenth century: She cuts her hair short, smokes cigarettes, and abandons her corset. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published.
1885 With Bland, Nesbit coauthors the novel The Prophet’s Mantle, a conventional romance plot set against a background of politics informed by their acquaintance with Russian émigrés living in London. When writing together, the couple often uses the alias “Fabian Bland.” The couple’s third child, Fabian, is born.
1886 Bland edits the Fabian Society journal, Today. His daughter Rosamund is born to Alice Hoatson; Nesbit agrees to raise the child as her own and allows Hoatson to move into the Bland-Nesbit home as a housekeeper. Nesbit has a brief affair with George Bernard Shaw. Lays and Legends, Nesbit’s collection of
poems, is released to critical success. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy is published.
1892 Nesbit’s first long work for children, a book-length narrative poem entitled The Voyage of Columbus, is published.
1893 Nesbit publishes two collections of horror stories: Something Wrong and Grim Tales; the latter includes “Man-size in Marble,” one of her most popular tales.
1894 Rudyard Kipling publishes The Jungle Book, a collection of animal stories. Robert Louis Stevenson dies.
1895 H. G. Wells publishes The Time Machine, his first major work of science fiction.
1896 Nesbit begins to serialize her childhood reminiscences in The Girl’s Own Paper.
1898 H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days are published.
1899 Nesbit begins her long collaboration with illustrator H. R. Millar when her dragon stories are published in The Strand Magazine. She also publishes Pussy and Doggy Tales, The Secret of Kyriels, an adult Gothic novel, and The Story of the Treasure Seekers, the first of the Bastable novels, with illustrations by Gordon Brown and Lewis Baumer. The success of The Treasure Seekers allows Nesbit and Bland to move into Well Hall, a spacious manor home. Bland’s second child with Alice Hoatson, christened John and nicknamed “The Lamb,” is born; Nesbit adopts and raises him.
1900 Nesbit publishes her dragon stories in the collection The Book of Dragons. L. Frank Baum publishes The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Beatrix Potter publishes The Tale of Peter Rabbit.
1901 The Wouldbegoods, another Bastable novel, is published, as is Nesbit’s Nine Unlikely Tales for Children (later reprinted as Whereyouwanttogo and Other Unlikely Tales). Kipling’s Kim appears.
1902 Nesbit publishes Five Children and It, her first fantasy novel. She meets H. G. Wells, an important influence on her fiction and for several years a controversial and outspoken member of the Fabian Society. Nesbit’s adult novel The Red House and The Revolt of the Toys, and What Comes of Quarreling are published. Kipling’s Just So Stories is released.