[2] The ill health of Edith's sister Mary meant that the family travelled for some years, living variously in Brighton, Buckinghamshire, France (Dieppe, Rouen, Paris, Tours, Poitiers, Angoulême, Bordeaux, Arcachon, Pau, Bagnères-de-Bigorre, and Dinan in Brittany), Spain and Germany.

Early on, Nesbit found that another woman, Maggie Doran, who lived with his mother, believed she was Hubert's fiancée and had also borne him a child.

She and her husband co-wrote under the pseudonym "Fabian Bland",[15] However, the joint work dwindled as her success rose as a children's author.

Edith lived from 1899 to 1920 at Well Hall, Eltham, in south-east London,[16] which makes fictional appearances in several of her books, such as The Red House.

Although she was the family breadwinner and has the father in The Railway Children declare that "[g]irls are just as clever as boys, and don’t you forget it!

"And, most crucially, both books are constructed from a blueprint that is also a kind of reënactment of the author’s own childhood: an idyll torn up at its roots by the exigencies of illness, loss, and grief.

The Telegraph reported that the Graves book had appeared in 1896, nine years prior to The Railway Children, and listed similarities between them.

[26] Nesbit's biographer Julia Briggs names her "the first modern writer for children", who "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".

In a letter to an early biographer, Noel Streatfeild wrote, "She had an economy of phrase and an unparalleled talent for evoking hot summer days in the English countryside.

"[29] Among Nesbit's best-known books are The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) and The Wouldbegoods (1901), which tell of the Bastables, a middle-class family fallen on relatively hard times.

[32] This influenced directly or indirectly many later writers, including P. L. Travers (of Mary Poppins), Edward Eager, Diana Wynne Jones and J. K. Rowling.

C. S. Lewis too paid heed to her in the Narnia series[33] and mentions the Bastable children in The Magician's Nephew, which, in its scenes of Jadis (a.k.a.

Science fiction and fantasy writer Michael Moorcock adopted Nesbit's character of Oswald Bastable for a trilogy of steampunk novels beginning with The Warlord of the Air.

Aside from an episode of the BBC's 'A Ghost Story for Christmas' from her autobiographical Long Ago When I was Young (published 1966), Nesbit has been the subject of five biographies.