A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit

In A Woman of Passion, Julia Briggs chronicles the life of author Edith Nesbit who is credited with being the first modern writer for children and the creator of the children’s adventure story. Nesbit recorded her life with varying degrees of honesty in verse and prose, and while she seldom wrote entirely openly of her own experiences, she seldom wrote convincingly of anything else. In this fascinating read, Julia Briggs attempts to fill in the gaps of Nesbit’s autobiographical material, painting an intriguing portrait of the famous author.

E. Nesbit is one of the great children’s writers of the century. Though known in her day for her poems, short stories, and novels, she is now remembered as the author of The Railway Children, The Treasure Seekers, Five Children and It, and many other stories of magic and adventure that are still triumphantly in print. Her readers loved to think of her as reassuringly maternal, but this biography reveals her as a strong-minded, adventurous woman.