forth between the marvelous and the real, and much of their fascination lies in the interaction and confusion between them. In Five Children and It (1902), her first fantasy novel, the children’s exercise of imagination comes simply from the opportunity to have their wishes granted, and the results, however amusing to us, are sufficiently troublesome or embarrassing to make them welcome (at least temporarily) the return to the ordinary. In The Enchanted Castle (1907), the magic is more elusive and complex, and it leads to a serious meditation on the gift of imagination—its multi-form capacity to produce butterflies as well as dragons, and above all its power to redeem and transfigure, as the hippogriff does, the distress, insecurity, and inevitable sorrows of life in this world.

I

The life of Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) spanned the period that is now regarded as the golden age of children’s literature in the English-speaking world. The major precondition for this development lies in the emergence of modern industrial society, which produced not only an increasingly literate middle-class population but also a sharp division between home and workplace that effectively created the concept and condition of “childhood” as we now know it. Books for children have a long history, but there is little precedent for the boom in children’s fiction that began in the mid-nineteenth century. This new literature appeared in a variety of forms, including, among others, the boys’ adventure tale, the family story (a specialty of women writers), and the fantasy novel, which was often cross-written for children and adults. The adventure story, which descends from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its many imitators, was pioneered in the mid-nineteenth century by Captain Frederick Marryat (1792—1848), R. M. Ballantyne (1825-1894), and Mayne Reid (1818-1883), and somewhat later by the prolific G. A. Henty (1832-1902), “the boys’ own historian,” who wrote more than one hundred novels featuring young male heroes caught up in significant historical conflicts. (Nesbit parodies Henty in Five Children and It, chapters 6 and 7; see endnote 4.) Among the finest fruits of this genre are the classics by Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, 1883; Kidnapped, 1886) and Mark Twain (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884). The family story, which also rose to prominence in this period, is associated primarily with women writers such as Charlotte Yonge (1823-1901), Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841-1885), Mary Louisa Molesworth (1839-1921), and, in America, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888), whose Little Women (1868) is widely regarded as the first masterpiece of this tradition, which paved the way for later classics such as Nesbit’s The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) and its sequels. In retrospect, perhaps the most remarkable children’s genre to emerge in the mid-nineteenth century is the cross-generational fantasy novel. Inspired by the immensely popular fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (translated 1823-1826) and Hans Christian Andersen (translated in 1846), the fantasy tradition was built on the firm foundation established by three Victorian authors—George MacDonald (1824-1905), Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), and Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)—who produced a series of masterpieces over the course of little more than a decade. These include MacDonald’s Phantastes (1858), At the Back of the North Wind (1871), and The Princess and the Goblin (1872); Kingsley’s singular classic The Water-Babies (1863); and Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871). In the first decade of the twentieth century, this tradition produced an especially rich harvest, often in the form of animal fantasies that Rudyard Kipling (1865—1936) popularized in his Jungle Books (1894, 1895); Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit series (begun in 1900); Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900) and its sequels; Kipling’s own Just So Stories (1902) and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906); J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” (first staged in 1904); Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908); and Walter de la Mare’s The Three Mulla-Mulgars (1910). It is no coincidence that in this same brief and remarkable period, which came to an end around World War I, E. Nesbit also produced nearly all of the children’s fantasy novels for which she is now remembered.

II

As a writer of children’s fiction, Nesbit often drew upon her own early life and her experience as the mother of five children. It is no accident that the absence of one or both parents looms large in her fiction: Her father, a well-known agronomist who ran a small agricultural college in London, died when she was three. For the next few years, his widow managed the college on her own, but