E. Nesbit

Edith Nesbit (1858–1924) was an English writer who published as E. Nesbit and was a founding member of the Fabian Society in 1884 with her husband Hubert Bland, whose children by another woman she raised as her own. After years of poetry and potboilers she found her form at forty with The Story of the Treasure Seekers in 1899, and over the next decade wrote the books that made her the first modern children's novelist: Five Children and It, The Phoenix and the Carpet, The Railway Children and The Enchanted Castle. Her influence runs through C. S. Lewis, P. L. Travers and J. K. Rowling.