E. Nesbit is one of the great children's writers of the century. Though known in her day for her poems, short stories, and novels, she is now remembered as the author of The Railway Children, The Treasure Seekers, Five Children and It, and many other stories of magic and adventure that are still triumphantly in print. Her readers loved to think of her as reassuringly maternal, but this biography reveals her as a strong-minded, adventurous woman.

Like all the best biographies, this is not the story of one person, but of an era, clamorous with lost voices.