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It’s strange how figures who chaffed against the establishment when they were alive, can end up becoming symbols of a simpler, sweeter, gentler time for future generations.
As the author of children’s classics like The Railways Children, Five Children and It, and The Enchanted Castle, Edith Nesbit conjures up images of country cottages, Sunday afternoons, sitting with the family, watching costume dramas on television.
And yet Nesbit and her husband Hubert Bland were committed political activists. They were both founder members of the socialist Fabien Society, and together edited the society’s journal, Today. She was a prominent lecturer and writer on socialism during the 1880s and her close circle of friends included prominent rebels like George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the London School of Economics.
Her private life was very unconventional. Her husband Bland was an unrepentant philanderer. Early on in their marriage, she discovered that another woman believed herself to be his fiancée, and she already had a child by him. Later, Nesbit’s friend Alice Hoatson revealed she had been impregnated by Bland. Hoatson would become their housekeeper and secretary, with her baby, Rosamund, raised as one of Nesbit’s own. Hoatson would be impregnated by Bland again 13 years later; her son would again be raised as part of Nesbit’s family.
It's notable that many of her ghost stories, like Man-Size in Marble, include strong and loving relationships that are suddenly torn apart by strange and bizarre events outside of the protagonist’s control. Nesbit was considered by her contemporaries to be a strong, independent character. It’s easy to look at her ghost stories and see them as a vessel for exploring the private angst, anxiety, and emotional toll she felt because of her chaotic personal life.
(After Bland’s death, Nesbit would marry the more conventional Thomas "the Skipper" Tucker, the Captain of the Woolwich Ferry.)
Although it should be noted that Nesbit admitted to having several supernatural experiences as a child. She claimed to have lived in 2 haunted houses while she was young. She also spoke of having 2 phobias – of being buried alive, and the dead returning to life. These fears may have been borne of a visit to see the mummified corpses of Saint Michel in Bordeaux France, an experience she described as “the crowning horror of my childish life. It is to them more than any other thing that I owe nights and nights of anguish and horror…”
One of the great pleasures of Nesbit’s ghost stories is that unlike many writers of the classic era, she does not deal in cosy terrors. When horror strikes, she doesn’t mince words. She goes right for the jugular.
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Man-Size in Marble by Edith Nesbit | New Ghost Stories Pocast Bonus