Nesbit was born in 1858 at 38 Lower Kennington Lane in Kennington, Surrey (now part of Greater London), the daughter of an agricultural chemist, John Collis Nesbit, who died in March 1862, before her fourth birthday. Her sister Mary's ill health meant that the family moved around constantly for some years, living variously in Brighton, Buckinghamshire, France (Dieppe, Rouen, Paris, Tours, Poitiers, Angoulême, Bordeaux, Arcachon, Pau, Bagnères-de-Bigorre, and Dinan in Brittany), Spain and Germany, before settling for three years at Halstead Hall in Halstead in north-west Kent, a location which later inspired The Railway Children (this distinction has also been claimed by the Derbyshire town of New Mills).

When Nesbit was 17, the family moved again, this time back to London, living variously in South East London at Eltham, Lewisham, Grove Park and Lee.

A follower of William Morris, 19-year-old Nesbit met bank clerk Hubert Bland in 1877. Seven months pregnant, she married Bland on 22 April 1880, though she did not immediately live with him, as Bland initially continued to live with his mother. Their marriage was an open one. Bland also continued an affair with Alice Hoatson which produced two children (Rosamund in 1886 and John in 1899), both of whom Nesbit raised as her own. Her own children were Paul Bland (1880—1940), to whom The Railway Children was dedicated; Iris Bland (1881-1950s); and Fabian Bland (1885—1900), who died aged 15 after a tonsil operation, and to whom she dedicated Five Children And It and its sequels, as well as The Story of the Treasure Seekers and its sequels.

Nesbit and Bland were among the founders of the Fabian Society in 1884. Their son Fabian was named after the society. They also jointly edited the Society's journal Today; Hoatson was the Society's assistant secretary. Nesbit and Bland also dallied briefly with the Social Democratic Federation, but rejected it as too radical. Nesbit was an active lecturer and prolific writer on socialism during the 1880s. Nesbit also wrote with her husband under the name "Fabian Bland", though this activity dwindled as her success as a children's author grew.

Nesbit lived from 1899 to 1920 in Well Hall House, Eltham, Kent (now in south-east Greater London). On 20 February 1917, some three years after Bland died, Nesbit married Thomas "the Skipper" Tucker, a ship's engineer on the Woolwich Ferry. She was a guest speaker at the London School of Economics.

Towards the end of her life she moved to a house called "Crowlink" in Friston, East Sussex, and later to St Mary's Bay in Romney Marsh, East Kent. Suffering from lung cancer, she died in 1924 at New Romney, Kent, and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary in the Marsh.

Nesbit published approximately 40 books for children, both novels and collections of stories. Collaborating with others, she published almost as many more.

According to her biographer Julia Briggs, Nesbit was "the first modern writer for children":"(Nesbit) helped to reverse the great tradition of children's literature inaugurated by [[Lewis Carroll|[Lewis] Carroll]], [[George Macdonald|[George] MacDonald]] and Kenneth Grahame, in turning away from their secondary worlds to the tough truths to be won from encounters with things-as-they-are, previously the province of adult novels." Briggs also credits Nesbit with having invented the children's adventure story. Noël Coward was a great admirer of hers and, in a letter to an early biographer Noel Streatfeild, wrote "she had an economy of phrase, and an unparalleled talent for evoking hot summer days in the English countryside."

Among Nesbit's best-known books are The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1898) and The Wouldbegoods (1899), which both recount stories about the Bastables, a middle class family that has fallen on relatively hard times. Her children's writing also included numerous plays and collections of verse.

She created an innovative body of work that combined realistic, contemporary children in real-world settings with magical objects and adventures and sometimes travel to fantastic worlds. In doing so, she was a direct or indirect influence on many subsequent writers, including P. L. Travers (author of Mary Poppins), Edward Eager, Diana Wynne Jones and J. K. Rowling. C. S. Lewis wrote of her influence on his Narnia series and mentions the Bastable children in The Magician's Nephew. Michael Moorcock would go on to write a series of steampunk novels with an adult Oswald Bastable (of The Treasure Seekers) as the lead character.

The Bastables Series

• 1899 The Story of the Treasure Seekers
• 1901 The Wouldbegoods
• 1904 The New Treasure Seekers
• 1905 Oswald Bastable And Others
• 1928 Complete History of Bastable Family

Psammead Series

• 1902 Five Children and It
• 1904 The Phoenix and the Carpet
• 1906 The Story of the Amulet

House of Arden Series

• 1908 The House of Arden
• 1909 Harding's Luck

Others

• 1885 Pussy and Doggy Tales
• 1885 All Round the Year
• 1885 Many Voices
• 1885 The Rainbow and the Rose
• 1885 The Prophet's Mantle
• 1886 Something Wrong
• 1893 Grim Tales
• 1893 The Pilot
• 1894 Miss Mischief
• 1894 The Butler in Bohemia
• 1895 Tales of the Clock
• 1896 In Homespun
• 1897 Tales Told in Twilight
• 1898 The Book of Dogs
• 1897 The Children's Shakespeare
• 1897 Royal Children of English History
• 1899 The Secret of the Kyriels
• 1900 The Book of Dragons
• 1901 Nine Unlikely Tales
• 1901 Thirteen Ways Home
• 1902 The Red House
• 1902 The Revolt of the Toys
• 1902 Edith Nesbit's Tales of Terror
• 1902 Tales of Terror
• 1903 The Rainbow Queen
• 1903 Playtime Stories
• 1903 The Literary Sense
• 1904 The Story of Five Rebellious Dolls
• 1904 Cat Tales
• 1905 Pug Peter, King of Mouseland
• 1906 The Railway Children
• 1906 The Incomplete Amorist
• 1906 Man and Maid
• 1907 Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare
• 1907 The Enchanted Castle
• 1908 The Old Nursery Stories
• 1908 The Three Mothers
• 1909 The House With No Address
• 1909 These Little Ones
• 1909 Daphne in Fitzroy Street
• 1909 Salome and the Head
• 1910 Fear
• 1910 The Magic City
• 1911 Dormant aka Rose Royal
• 1911 The Wonderful Garden
• 1912 The Magic World
• 1913 Wet Magic
• 1921 The Incredible Honeymoon
• 1922 The Lark
• 1923 To the Adventurous
• 1925 Five of Us and Madeline

Poetry

• 1887 Spring Songs and Sketches
• 1894 A Pomander Of Verse
• 1899 Villegiature

• E-texts of works by E. Nesbit (some illustrated)
• Melisande by E. Nesbit, a tale similar to Rapunzel
• My School Days (article series by Nesbit)
• The Magic World
• Free audiobooks by E. Nesbit from LibriVox

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