Katherine Rundell on E Nesbit

Great Lives

BBC

History, Documentary, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.2 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

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Summary

Bestselling children's author Katherine Rundell discusses the extraordinary life of E Nesbit who wrote The Railway Children and Five Children And It.

Katherine praises her “bold unwillingness to speak down to children” and reflects that “she never seemed to forget what it was like to be a child”. E, or Edith, Nesbit’s conjuring of mythical beasts like the Phoenix and the sand fairy the Psammead was a particular inspiration to Katherine Rundell who says "you can really believe they are flesh and blood”. Edith Nesbit has also influenced the work of Jacqueline Wilson and JK Rowling who have both praised this trailblazing writer.

She had a particularly colourful private life and a very open marriage. She flouted the social conventions of the time. She was married when seven months pregnant. Her husband had children outside of their relationship and Edith then raised them as her own. She was a feminist but didn't believe in Votes for Women. She co-founded the Fabian Society and kept company with the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward.

Katherine Rundell is joined by Elisabeth Galvin who has written a biography of E Nesbit. The programme features an excerpt from The Phoenix And The Carpet by E Nesbit as well as clips from the 1970 film of The Railway Children distributed by EMI films and the 1991 BBC television adaptation of Five Children And It.

Presenter: Matthew Parris Producer: Robin Markwell

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Helena Bonkarter and this is history's secret heroes.
0:07.0	In this series we'll hear stories of daring secret missions and rarely heard tales from World War II, like Emily, the enigmatic high-ranking
0:17.2	codebreaker, and Tremont, the escape artist, interned in a German camp.
0:24.0	Tales of danger, dynamism and downright determination.
0:27.8	The new series of history's secret heroes.
0:30.5	Listen first on BBC Sounds.
0:33.0	BBC Sounds.
0:34.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts.
0:38.0	Today's Great Life
0:40.0	belongs to a writer who perhaps understood children as well as any grown-up ever has.
0:47.1	She was a moldbreaker who conjured worlds of fantasy, magic and adventure, and what's more her own extraordinary life was too often
0:56.3	stranger than fiction. She was a passionate bohemian woman who had utterly inappropriate
1:02.0	affairs in a very open marriage.
1:04.3	She brought up five children, only three of them her own.
1:07.5	She socialised with George Bernard Shaw and Noel Coward,
1:11.1	and somehow she found time to publish 40 books for children too. She was E. Nesbit. Are you
1:19.3	sitting comfortably? Then let's begin. The egg was glowing and inside it something was moving.
1:26.0	Next moment there was a soft cracking sound.
1:29.0	The egg burst in two and out of it came a flame-colored bird. As it rested among the flames,
1:36.6	the children watched it begin to grow bigger and bigger.
1:40.6	Which of you, it said, put the egg into the fire?
1:44.0	He did, said three voices and three fingers pointed at Robert.
	...

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