working at top speed to keep the family afloat. Although she acquired a modest reputation as a poet and novelist, very few of these works have survived the test of time. After twenty years of prolific publication, she finally achieved acclaim with the release of her first children’s novel, The Story of the Treasure Seekers: Being the Adventures of the Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune (1899), a family adventure tale based on stories she had written for various magazines. The book sold well, and she capitalized on its success with a sequel, The Wouldbegoods: Being the Further Adventures of the Treasure Seekers (1901) and The New Treasure Seekers (1904). At the same time, she wrote her first fantasy novel, Five Children and It (1902), and employed the same set of children in two sequels, The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) and The Story of the Amulet (1906). By this time her reputation was well established, but more successes would follow. In 1906 she published one of her most enduring family stories, The Railway Children, and the following year The Enchanted Castle, which many regard as her most mature work of fiction. Inspired by the success of H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), she then produced two time-travel romances, The House of Arden (1908) and its sequel, Harding’s Luck (1909), which have since lost some of their popular appeal, though a number of readers regard them as her best. A few other notable works appeared in subsequent years—The Magic City (1910), The Wonderful Garden (1911), The Magic World (1912), and Wet Magic (1913)—but in her last decade she wrote comparatively little for children and nothing to match the level of achievement in her decade-long run from The Story of the Treasure Seekers to Harding’s Luck.

III

The Story of the Treasure Seekers established the prototype for both the “realistic” family adventures and the “magical” fantasies that Nesbit composed over the next few years. At the outset of these novels, we are introduced to a middle-class family, often in distressed circumstances. Since the parents are either absent or preoccupied, the children are nominally in the care of servants, but usually left to their own devices, they embark on a series of exploits, sometimes designed to rectify the situation at home, at other times simply for the sake of adventure or sheer diversion. In The Treasure Seekers, we meet the six Bastable children (four boys and two girls), whose mother is dead and whose father is struggling with business problems. According to the eldest boy, Oswald, the novel’s delightfully bookish and vainglorious narrator, the children seek to restore “the fortunes of the ancient House of Bastable,” and they launch their quest by digging for buried treasure in their own garden. The scheme collapses when the roof of their underground tunnel caves in on the hapless Albert-next-door, but thanks to Albert’s amiable uncle—the first of several sympathetic adults—the children end up “discovering” a few small coins in their pile of dirt. In successive episodes, the Bastables continue their fortune-hunting by becoming freelance detectives, selling poetry to an amused literary editor, publishing a newspaper (one copy sold), and “kidnapping” Albert-next-door to extract a ransom from his uncle. The consequences of their later exploits are more serious. Finding a newspaper ad for private loans, the children visit the office of their “Generous Benefactor,” but complications arise when it turns out that the lender is already their father’s creditor. Further embarrassments result from their attempt to secure another benefactor by setting their dog on a rich local aristocrat and pretending to come to his rescue, and from their efforts to market their own wine and Bastable’s Certain Cure for Colds. The loose episode structure that emerges from these relatively self-contained adventures is characteristic of Nesbit’s early novels, though the interaction between juvenile imagination and adult reality often grows more complex in the later episodes. In one of the final vignettes of The Treasure Seekers, the children are imagining the life of a robber when suddenly they see a stranger whom they suspect is the real thing. The stranger, who is actually a friend of their father, pretends that he has been caught in the act, but when another unknown figure appears upon the scene and turns out be a real burglar, the imaginary “robber” borrows the children’s toy gun to scare him off. The novel concludes with another reversal of expectations, when the children discover that their seemingly poor and unremarkable Indian Uncle is actually the