Abstract
It has long been recognised that Edith Nesbit’s children’s books have played a pivotal role in the development of modern children’s literature (Crouch, 15–25). Children’s authors themselves have repeatedly confirmed their enthusiasm for and indebtedness to Nesbit. C. S. Lewis, for one, celebrated her work in the various devices and motifs he borrowed from it in his Narnian Chronicles; they range from the magical ‘Bigwardrobeinspareroom’ which opens into the world of the supernatural to the intrusion of the imperious Queen from another dimension into contemporary London.1
‘I don’t understand,’ says Gerald, alone in his third-class carriage, ‘how railway trains and magic can go on at the same time.’
And yet they do.
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Works Consulted
Edith Nesbit, Five Children and It (1902) quotations from Penguin edn, 1959.
Edith Nesbit, The Enchanted Castle (1907) quotations from Penguin edn, 1979.
Edith Nesbit, The House of Arden (1908) Penguin 1986.
Edith Nesbit, The Last of the Dragons. Penguin 1975.
Edith Nesbit, The Magic World (1912)
Edith Nesbit, The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) quotations from Penguin edn, 1959.
Edith Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet (1906) quotations from Penguin edn, 1959.
Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit (London: Hutchinson, 1987).
Basil Bunting, Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1978).
Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: The Golden Age of Children’s Literature (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985).
Marcus Crouch, The Nesbit Tradition: The Children’s Novel in England 1945–1970 (London: Ernest Benn, 1972).
Erhard Dahl, Die Entstehung der Phantastischen Kinder und Jugender-zählung in England (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1986).
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983).
C. S. Lewis. Surprised by Joy (London, 1955).
Colin Manlove. ‘The Union of Opposites in Fantasy: E. Nesbit’ in The Impulse of Fantasy Literature (Kent: Kent State Univ. Press, 1983).
Charlotte Spivack, Merlin’s Daughters: Contemporary Women Writers of Fantasy. (Westport, Ct: Greenwood, 1987).
Stephen Prickett, Victorian Fantasy (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1979).
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (London: Allen and Unwin, Various editions).
James Walvin, A Child’s World: A. Social History of English Childhood 1800–1914. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).
Charles Williams, The Image of the City (London, 1958).
Charles Williams, War in Heaven (London, 1930).
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© 1991 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Schenkel, E. (1991). Domesticating the Supernatural: Magic in E. Nesbit’s Children’s Books. In: Filmer, K. (eds) The Victorian Fantasists. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21277-4_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21277-4_15
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