Her father, John Collins Nesbit, head of an agricultural college, died when she was four years old, and she spent her childhood at a series of boarding schools she hated, alternating with a bewildering routine of European travel, while her mother, Sarah Green Nesbit, and older stepsister, Sarah Green, devoted themselves to restoring the health of Edith's tubercular sister, Mary. The brightest memories of Nesbit's early life were the carefree, unsupervised summers spent roaming the French or English countryside with her two brothers, Henry and Alfred. From these childhood experiences stemmed her hatred for formal schooling and her conviction that children need freedom to engage in adventurous, imaginative play, beliefs that underlie her adult nostalgia for childhood.
A moody, fearful, imaginative child, Nesbit began writing poetry at an early age and idolized Christina Rossetti, having an indirect acquaintance with the pre-Raphaelite circle through Mary's fiancé, the poet Philip Bourke Marston. After Mary's death in 1871, however, the fortunes of the Nesbit family gradually declined. As she grew up, Nesbit began to publish a small amount of poetry and to engage in rebellious, unconventional behavior. She entered into a relationship with Hubert Bland, a young socialist and aspiring businessman, whom she married on 22 April 1880, when she was already seven months pregnant.
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