Edith Bland (née Nesbit) (15 August 1858 – 4 May 1924) was a popular and influential English author of children's adventure stories under the name of "E. Nesbit".
Famous works include The Story of the Treasure Seekers (and sequels), Five Children and It (and sequels), and The Railway Children.
E. Nesbit was unusual for her time in writing children's stories set in the real world, instead of in a made-up fantasyland, although many of them (such as Five Children and It) contain fantasy elements.
Works by E. Nesbit with their own trope page include:
- Five Children and It (and sequels)
- "John Charrington's Wedding"
- Melisande
- The Railway Children
- The Story of the Treasure Seekers (and sequels)
- Wet Magic
Other works by E. Nesbit provide examples of:
- Call a Pegasus a "Hippogriff": Trope Namer. In "The Book Of Beasts", the hero must summon a creature identified as a hippogriff to save his city from a dragon. The creature that appears is what most people would identify as a pegasus, a winged horse. To be fair, you can't say that a hippogriff isn't a winged horse (or that a pegasus isn't technically part horse, part bird for that matter). It's also possible that Nesbit figured that the word pegasus must only refer to the Pegasus.
- Curious as a Monkey: The protagonist of "The Caves and the Cockatrice":His inquiring mind led him to take clocks to pieces to see what made them go, to take locks off doors to see what made them stick. It was Edmund who cut open the India rubber ball to see what made it bounce, and he never did see, any more than you did when you tried the same experiment.
- Moustache de Plume, ambiguous initials subtype
- Our Dragons Are Different: "The Dragon Tamers" includes a Western style dragon covered nose to tail in rusty armor plating; after a set of adventures (including a fight with a giant), he ends up befriending the blacksmith's son and the other children in the village, after which the armor falls off and the dragon turns out to be the world's first cat.
- Stating the Simple Solution: In The Enchanted Castle, the wishes made by the children expire after a limited time, according to rules they can't quite work out (the first wish lasted 21 hours, the second 14, the third 7, then things seem to get more random). When they're discussing the question with one of the living statues in the castle grounds, he points out that there's nothing stopping them from fixing the duration of the wish when they make it - for example, "I wish that till the dawn I may be a statue of living marble... and that after that time I may be as before."
- Taken for Granite: Kathleen in The Enchanted Castle is turned into marble after carelessly wishing she was a statue (because statues are cool - temperature-wise, that is). She remains conscious, but fortunately being a statue is very comfortable and calming. Kathleen knows everything will turn out fine as all she has to do is wait patiently until the spell wears off. Later averted when all the statues come to life, Kathleen among them, and she begins to panic. The animate statues however are still marble rather than flesh and blood.
