ABSTRACT
Edith Nesbit, now best remembered as author of The Railway Children, was the sixth child and younger daughter of John Collis Nesbit, proprietor of an agricultural college, and his wife Sarah Green. Like many of the other autobiographers in this collection, she experienced an interrupted education, as the Nesbits sought a warmer climate for their consumptive daughter Mary. The mummies of Bordeaux were for her 'the crowning horror' of her childish life. A sunnier world of imaginative play kept secret from adults is a hallmark of her best-known children's books, such as The Phoenix and the Carpet and her tales of the Bastables, beginning with The Story of the Treasure-Seekers, published soon after the recollections of her schooldays in The Girl's Own Paper. Nesbit's recollections of her childhood and schooldays were commissioned for serialisation in The Girl's Own Paper from 10 October 1896 until 11 September 1897.
