Biography

August 15, 1858 · London, England, UK

May 4, 1924 · New Romney, Kent, England, UK

Edith Nesbit

Edith and Hubert had a rather "open marriage"; Edith had affairs with George Bernard Shaw and others, while her husband Hubert Bland continued to see Alice Hoatson in an affair which produced two children (Rosamund in 1886 and John in 1899), both of whom Nesbit raised as her own. Edith's own children were Paul Bland (1880-1940), Iris Bland (1881-1819??), and Fabian Bland (1885-1900, who died aged 15 after a tonsils operation). With Hubert, Edith also published under the pseudonym "Fabian Bland." Edith and Hubert, after the turn of the century, both converted to Catholicism. Four years after Hubert Bland died in 1913, Nesbit married Thomas Tucker, an affable, loving ship's engineer from a lower-class background, thus practicing what she preached.

Daughter of John Collis Nesbit, a schoolmaster, who died in March, 1862, before she was four.

Edith was great friends with Berta Ruck, and named the character Roberta in "The Railway Children" after Berta.

After her father died, the Nesbit family moved to the Continent, where Edith was educated in France and Germany; in 1872, the Nesbits returned to England.

Joint editor, with husband Hubert Bland, of the Fabian Society's journal, "Today." Their marriage has been called "an unorthodox and tumultuous marriage." As a member of the Fabian Society, she became friends with Eleanor Marx (youngest daughter of Karl Marx), Annie Besant, suffragist-writer Clementina Black, George Bernard Shaw, and politician/writers Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb.