... meticulous and invaluable ... Ms. Fitzsimons draws abundantly on Moore’s and Briggs’s research, but her palette has an even greater range of colors, and she also brings to light many previously hidden biographical watermarks. If her book lacks Briggs’s stylistic elegance, she excels in providing exceptionally illuminating and detailed portraits of the extraordinary group of practical and utopian socialists, mutual-aid anarchists, theosophists, feminists, radical freethinkers, and trailblazing writers who were part of the Bland-Nesbit milieu ... [a] fine biography.
Fitzsimons evidently assumes you already know most...things [about Nesbit]. Taking her subject as a known quantity, she opens her book with a sentimental description of a lurid incident from Nesbit’s childhood that haunted the author for the rest of her life ... Fitzsimons...shows less interest in rhapsodizing over Nesbit’s style than in exploring the purpose and personal history that underlay it ... Nesbit’s child characters...'reflect the Fabian belief that socialism transcends class since it benefits everyone.' The Bastables, the Psammead children and the railway children put that belief into action in their fictional lives. But did Nesbit do so in her real one? Fitzsimons explores this question thoroughly ... In her biography, Fitzsimons handily reassembles the hundreds of intricate, idiosyncratic parts of the miraculous E. Nesbit machine; but the secret of how she made it all come together and hum remains intact.
... insightful and lively ... Finding explicit similarities between an author’s work and their life can feel forced, but Fitzsimons makes extensive and excellent use of Nesbit’s fiction and poetry, and in doing so she illuminates both Nesbit’s work and her life. At times the narrative trembles under the sheer weight of names, though that isn’t the biographer’s fault; so many friends and potential lovers came in and out of Nesbit’s highly sociable life that it can be hard for the reader to keep track of them all ... Like all the best literary biographies, this highly readable book will send readers back to that writing.
Nesbit was a startlingly racy, contradictory, emblematic figure of her time. She belonged to a late nineteenth-century cohort of advanced women – aesthetic women, bohemian women, Fabian women and New Women ... Fitzsimons’s book, which is about 150 pages longer than Galvin’s, has been enthusiastically reviewed in the UK and published in the US, where Nesbit is largely unknown ... Fitzsimons provides a very readable and thoroughly documented narrative of Nesbit’s life, social circle and literary afterlife, but offers few of her own interpretations of Nesbit’s behaviour ... Indeed, there’s so much drama and mystery in Nesbit’s life that two biographies at a time seem barely enough. Can we have a television series and a biopic?
In her readable and thorough biography, Eleanor Fitzsimons presents a real life of high drama and storytelling ... interesting in showing how Nesbit’s lifelong socialist principles found expression in her children’s books. Yet perhaps the biographer is too insistent on drawing links between the life and the fiction. It is true that Nesbit’s characters are often semi-orphans, but then any children’s writer worth their salt knows that absent, or at least supremely negligent, parents are a prerequisite for a decent adventure. Fitzsimons does not always allow for the complex workings of fantasy, craft and imagination in the fiction – elements that are just as relevant, one suspects, in Nesbit’s approach to life.
Fitzsimmons has done prodigious research to bring [Nesbit's] story to vibrant life. Indeed, it sometimes seems that she is offering a day-to-day account of Nesbit’s life, with her work taking a back seat. Fortunately, the life is interesting enough to fill this large, minutely detailed, well-written biography ... As an author, she was one of a kind, and Fitzsimmons makes a compelling case for her stature as an important writer. This biography is long overdue.
... reveals familiar as well as unexpected details and anecdotes from Nesbit’s tempestuous, bohemian life ... Fitzsimons ably demonstrates how Nesbit’s singular ability to write from the perspective of a child, weaving magic and fantasy into everyday life in a colloquial style, became the prototype for modern children’s fiction. She shines a welcome spotlight on a life 'as extraordinary as anything found in the pages of her books' ... A fascinating, thoughtfully organized, thoroughly researched, often surprising biography of the enigmatic author.
... a charming, lively, and old-fashioned biography ... Fitzsimons’s book benefits from a wealth of sources, though some repetitions, such as the many references to Nesbit’s long cigarette holder, might be trimmed. Overall, however, Fitzsimons delivers a sprightly and highly readable life of a writer who deserves even wider recognition.
