Edith Nesbit is the ideal children’s author. Her imagination is vast, her skill for verisimilitude acute, and her ear for combining the two is perfectly tuned. She never makes the presumed oral reader a slave, but creates an enjoyable, respectful partnership with the other adult in the room. The foregoing, sadly, dissects her like a frog. The proper way to present her would be to grab your hand, hollering that there’s a really cool frog on the porch that you have to come see right now!
Nesbit is a clear forerunner of other similarly talented authors. Her facility in both realism and high fantasy is familiar to anyone who grew up switching between Madeleine L’Engle’s fictional structures of Chronos and Kairos. Literary homage is also evident in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series (published 1965–1977), which echoes Nesbit’s nimble navigation of reality and fantasy. But debts to Nesbit are paid even earlier: C. S. Lewis tips his hat to Nesbit on the first page of The Magician’s Nephew, naming her Bastable children as a reference point for readers of his own story.
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