Nesbit liked to describe herself as a child who had never grown up, further explaining in Wings and the Child (1913) that children "cannot be understood by imagination, by observation, nor even by love. They can only be understood by memory." This ability to reenter childhood at will, ironically enough, did not always help her deal tactfully with her own offspring; yet it is crucial to the success of her writings for children. From the Bastable stories through the posthumously published Five of Us--and Madeline (1925), Nesbit drew on her own youthful experiences and recollections to produce lively and heartfelt works, both gently mocking childhood's manners and mores and wholly sympathetic to children themselves.
Born on 15 August 1858 to Sarah Alderton Nesbit and her second husband, John Collis Nesbit, Edith was the youngest of six children. The siblings closest to her in age were her two brothers, Alfred and Harry, so she spent her early childhood as the participant and occasional victim in their rough-and-tumble escapades. Childhood was for her a golden time of imaginative play and freedom from responsibility, as she recounts in a series of articles titled "My School-Days" (published in the Girl's Own Paper between October 1896 and September 1897 and collected as Long Ago When I Was Young [1966]) and subsequently in her various fictional reworkings of this material.
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