Edith Nesbit was born in 1858 in Kennington in what is now greater London. She wrote or collaborated on over 60 children’s books under the name E. Nesbit. When she was fourteen the family settled for three years in Kent, England at Halstead Hall which would become the setting for her most successful book ‘The Railway Children’.

At the age of 19 she met and fell in love with Hubert Bland a fellow follower of William Morris and the growing Socialist movement. She became pregnant shortly after wards and they married in 1880, although the marriage was an open one, with Bland fathering two children by another lover, both of whom Nesbit brought up alongside her own three children.
She was also a political activist and co-founder of the Fabian Society.
She died in 1924.