Political activist and co-founded the Fabian Society, a socialist organisation later affiliated to the Labour Party.

Helped to reverse the great tradition of children's literature inaugurated by Lewis Carroll, 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. 

Born in London but educated in convents on the Continent and in England, Edith Nesbit started out as a writer of stories. In 1880, seven months pregnant, she married Hubert Bland, a founding member of the Fabian Society when it was founded four years later. Caught in a marriage with four children and infidelities on both sides, and with the main responsibility for income, Nesbit wrote commercial novels and stories, but she continued to produce volumes of poetry in hope of literary acclaim. Success arrived with her children`s books, especially the Bastable novels (The Story of the Treasure-Seekers, Would-be-Goods, and The New Treasure-seekers) and The Railway Children (190