Edith Nesbit’s Dogs

On #InternationalDogsDay here’s a short post about Edith Nesbit’s dogs and her unconditional love for them.

As a child, Edith was sent to boarding school in the picturesque town of Dinan in Brittany, northwest France. She missed her dog desperately and wrote to her mother to ask after “that queen of dogs that splendid lady that estimable that lovely loving lovable Trot”.

She always had dogs and often put them into her books. Prominent in several photographs she took at her home in Well Hall, Eltham is Martha, the bulldog immortalised in several Bastable stories. Martha also appears in ‘Fortunatus Rex & Co.’ from Nine Unlikely Tales. An old lady who wishes to protect her orchard demands that the king provide her with “a fierce bull-dog to fly at the throat of any one who should come over the wall”

So he got her a stout bull-dog whose name was Martha, and brought it himself in a jewelled leash. “Martha will fly at any one who is not of kingly blood,” said he. “Of course she wouldn’t dream of biting a royal person; but, then, on the other hand, royal people don’t rob orchards”.

Rosamund Bland with Martha and another dog (Edith Nesbit Archive, University of Tulsa)

Edith also adore her dachshunds, Max and Brenda, who make an appearance in The Magic City. For some reason, Gerald Spencer Pryse, who illustrated The Magic City when it was serialised in The Strand Magazine, drew them as Dalmatians even though Edith had described them as “dachshunds, very long and low”. H.R. Miller did the same in the book version.

 

Max and Brenda were not universally loved. One friend described them as snappy, and Edith’s adopted daughter Rosamund admitted that they were terribly spoilt. At mealtimes they would rush around the table, then jump onto Edith’s lap. If she had attached their leashes to her chair, she would trip over them when she got up.

For more on Edith and her extraordinary life, look out for my new biography, THE LIFE AND LOVES OF E. NESBIT, which will be published in October 2019.

New Book Deal: Biography of E. Nesbit

E. Nesbit

Some news! I’ve just signed a contract with Duckworth Overlook for book two, a biography of the brilliant and complex author E. Nesbit. I’m really excited about getting properly stuck in. Here’s the blurb from my agent’s website:

Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) is considered the first modern writer for children and a key influence for writers from C.S. Lewis to J.K. Rowling. Inventor of the children’s adventure story, her books remain hugely popular and are regularly adapted for stage and screen. A founder member of the Fabian Society and ‘a committed if distinctly eccentric socialist’, she railed against inequity, social injustice and state-sponsored oppression, incorporating her views into her books and influencing generations of children.

Described by George Bernard Shaw, one of a string of lovers, as ‘audaciously unconventional’, Nesbit’s unsettled childhood and vivid imagination conjured up fears and phobias that lasted into adulthood; she confronted them in the stories she populated with family, friends, lovers, and events from her life, often writing herself as twins – one brave, one retiring. A progressive woman, she cut her hair short and smoked incessantly. Yet, she never supported women’s suffrage and she remained loyal to her serially unfaithful husband, raising his live-in-lover’s children as her own.

This new biography, the first in more than two decades, will explore one of our most important writers in all her guises. Friends agreed ‘she could be morose as a gathering thundercloud…when she emerged – a sunburst!’ One described her as ‘wise – and frivolous; kind…and so intolerant’. She was intensely attractive to men and formed deep friendships with women too. Temperamental at times, she was also huge fun, always creative and often playful. Her parties were legendary, her ghost stories, terrifying, and her tales of adventure changed the world.

Publication (c) early 2018 all going well!