E. Nesbit's Savagely Confrontational, Feminist Ghost Stories

One of the most psychologically fascinating horror writers of her time, Edith Nesbit – perhaps more so than any of her peers – invested her entire heart into writing fiction, with a passion and intimacy that allowed her to project many of her darkest experiences and most crushing disappointment. The woman who is today better known as a Victorian children’s book writer is often neglected as a powerful architect of the terrible and ghastly. As it is, Nesbit’s literary reputation – while overwhelmingly positive in both camps – has been strangely siloed, as if in secrecy, between her light-side and dark-side.

As a result, those who are genuine devotees of her children’s fiction are often totally clueless that she is lauded for her savage ghost stories, while most admirers of “Man-Size in Marble” have no idea that her groundbreaking children’s literature directly influenced Mary Poppins, Harry Potter, and The Chronicles of Narnia. This segregated duality is extremely fitting, as her own life was often defined by emotional compartmentalization and painful repression. Her life was one torn between radicalism and conventionality, scandal and sobriety, defiance and compliance, and it largely orbited the actions of the domineering men in her life.  

HOUSE OF SHADOW, HOUSE OF LIGHT: 

THE DUAL LIFE AND LITERATURE OF EDITH NESBIT 

Since her literary renown stems from her prolific contributions to these two strikingly different genres, it is worth our time to examine them both before we consider the reasons for the split. Her best-known works, such as The Railway Children and Five Children and It, stand as seminal contributions to British children’s literature. These stories are marked by their realism blended with magic, their empathetic portrayal of childhood, and a tone that balances whimsy with wisdom.

Nesbit revolutionized the genre by grounding her fantastical plots in the everyday experiences of middle-class Edwardian children, making her characters accessible and deeply human. Her child protagonists are not idealized but flawed and spirited, navigating their adventures with a realism that was rare in Victorian literature. These tales of wonder, resilience, and family affection have endeared her to generations of readers. 

Nesbit's groundbreaking blend of fantasy and realism had a profound influence on many of the most celebrated writers of children’s literature who followed her. C.S. Lewis openly acknowledged her impact, particularly in The Chronicles of Narnia, where ordinary children stumble into magical worlds — a direct echo of Nesbit’s portal fantasies like The Enchanted Castle and The Story of the Amulet. Harry Potter’s J.K. Rowling and Mary Poppins’ P. L. Travers also acknowledged debts to Nesbit, especially in her portrayal of magical elements within an otherwise ordinary British setting, as well as her focus on the dynamics of children solving problems independently.

Diana Wynne Jones, author of Howl’s Moving Castle, admired Nesbit’s ability to make magic feel domestic and unpredictable, while still keeping her young characters emotionally grounded. Even Neil Gaiman has cited Nesbit as a favorite, particularly praising her balance of wonder and fear in storytelling — a hallmark of both her fantasy and horror work.  

These writers, and many more, drew on Nesbit’s pioneering narrative voice, her irreverent humor, and her willingness to treat children’s emotions and imaginations with seriousness and complexity, ensuring that her literary DNA runs deep in the genre to this day. Reading Edith Nesbit’s children’s stories feels like stepping into a world where magic casually brushes against the everyday, guided by a narrator who’s as witty, warm, and mischievous as the children at the heart of the adventure. Her stories are humorous, heart-warming, and life-affirming, buoyed by an ethos of childlike delight and optimistic wonder. 

In sharp contrast, Nesbit also authored chilling supernatural stories that explored darkness, dread, and psychological disquiet. Stories like “Man-Size in Marble” and “John Charrington’s Wedding” are canonical standards of early horror fiction – as surely as Stevenson’s “The Body-Snatcher” and Stoker’s “The Judge’s House” – relying on creeping unease, gothic atmosphere, and psychological tension rather than clichéd melodramatics. Her horror writing reveals a different facet of her literary talent—a fascination with mortality, betrayal, and the hidden terrors of domestic life.

This ability to shift so deftly between genres speaks to her narrative versatility, but also underscores a deep emotional and thematic duality. While her children’s stories offered hope, magic, and familial unity, her horror fiction probed the cracks in human relationships and the uncanny undercurrents of the mundane. 

This creative duality seems especially fitting when considered in light of Nesbit’s personal life, which was marked by emotional upheaval and a need for compartmentalization. Her marriage to was riddled with betrayal (he fathered children with other women, including one of her closest friends), and Nesbit herself bore the brunt of financial responsibility for their household.

Despite these personal challenges, she maintained a public image of cheerful domesticity while privately enduring heartbreak, jealousy, and economic instability. It is not difficult to see how this emotional dichotomy—simultaneous nurturing and suffering—could manifest as a literary split between comforting tales of family and eerie stories that peel back the veneer of everyday life to expose hidden fears and sorrows. 

Nesbit’s ability to navigate these extremes—both in life and literature—makes her body of work all the more compelling. Her children’s stories reflect an idealism perhaps born of longing: a desire for the stable, loving family that often eluded her in reality. Her horror stories, conversely, give voice to the suppressed fears, betrayals, and anxieties that haunted her personal life.

Rather than being seen as contradictory, these dual genres form a coherent whole, illustrating how Nesbit used storytelling to negotiate the emotional fragmentation of her lived experience. Her enduring legacy, then, lies not only in the breadth of her imagination but in her remarkable capacity to transform the contrasting textures of her life into enduring art. 

HEARTBREAK AT HOME:

HOW PERSONAL BETRAYAL SHAPED

NESBIT'S DARK IMAGINATION

There was another source of confounding duality in Nesbit’s household: her enigmatic, contrarian husband, Hubert Bland – a willful jumble of infuriating contradictions. Bland was a radical progressive and a militant misogynist. He exalted the rights of the working classes but denounced women’s rights as wrong-headed fantasy. His politics were far-left but his lifestyle was bourgeois bordering on aristocratic. His love life was scandalous and decadent but his ideals about domestic life were tame and traditional. He resented and dismissed women, but was overwhelmed with ardor for and fascination with them. Throughout his lifetime, Bland was a reprehensible Casanova – a man notorious for dozens of affairs, date rapes, and seductions. Nesbit’s first biographer complained that “he could not by any effort of nature leave women alone.”

In many ways, he was sadly ahead of his time: a censorious, preachy political activist whose self-righteous stance on “the right side of history” was at odds with his own habits of abuse, harassment, and deep-set sexism.  Bland was a monstrous walking scandal, known for entrapping young girls in sexual mind games before abandoning them. He was charismatic, loud, and authoritative, with an upturned mustache, slick, middle-parted hair, and an eyebrow-arching monocle that made him the very figure of a villain from an Edwardian melodrama.  

In Nesbit he found a very strange partner: although he had an infamous hate of imposing women who drew attention to themselves, she was remarkably tall and beautiful with a distinct, Bohemian fashion sense, and a reputation for smoking like a chimney in a time when women rarely used tobacco. She was charismatic, commanding rooms, flooding her parties with personality, and yet capable of sitting down to write a chapter in the middle of a garden soiree without being distracted.

She was a leading figure in her husband’s socialist club, the Fabian Society, and – for all of Bland’s guff about bossy women – she almost single-handedly supported their family with her income as a writer when her husband refused to work. None of this, however, did nothing to change his sexist convictions. Bland famously quipped:  

"Woman's métier in the world — I mean, of course, civilized woman, the woman in the world as it is — is to inspire romantic passion... Romantic passion is inspired by women who wear corsets. In other words, by the women who pretend to be what they not quite are."  

As it so happened, Nesbit was famously associated with the Artistic Dress Movement, which was against the stiff, tight-laced corsets and elaborate fashions of the upper classes. These women favored comfort, movement, and a kind of romantic, free-spirited look aligned with pre-Raphaelite vibes. Bland either didn’t care how his words reflected on his wife, or his trademark cognitive dissonance prevented him from recognizing the irony of his sexist comments. He was, all-in-all, an egotistical conundrum.  

Renowned biographer Claire Tomalin dressed him down on the matter of his wishy-washy lifestyle, groaning that  

"Bland [was] one of the minor enigmas of literary history in that everything reported of him makes him sound repellent, yet he was admired, even adored, by many intelligent men and women... He did not aspire to be consistent. He allowed his wife to support him with her pen for some years, but was always opposed to feminism... In mid-life he joined the Catholic Church, a further cosmetic touch to his old-world image, but without modifying his behaviour or even bothering to attend more than the statutory minimum of Masses."  

But just as Nesbit turned a blind eye to her husband’s loutish behavior, so too Bland seemed unshaken by his wife’s bold nonconformity – indeed, while chronically unfaithful, he seems to have genuinely been attracted to her. The pair met in 1877 when she was just 19 years old and he was 25. They connected through mutual interests in writing, politics, and socialism, and were both part of London’s bohemian and intellectual circles. Bland was charismatic, articulate, and politically active, which likely appealed to Nesbit’s adventurous and idealistic nature.

Their relationship quickly became serious, and when Edith became pregnant with their first child, they married in 1880, partly due to pressure from their friends. Nesbit was seven months along when she married Bland – however, she was not the first nor the last woman whom Bland would unexpectedly impregnate.    

Bland’s lascivious lifestyle and roaming libido only increased with marriage: while Nesbit bore him a toddling family of healthy children, he spent half of every week with his mother, casually siring a child with her nurse, all without Nesbit’s knowledge. The most brutal treachery started in 1885 when he began an affair with Nesbit’s best friend, Alice Hoatson, the assistant secretary to the Fabian Society.

Bland unabashedly invited Hoatson to enter their household, which quickly became a public ménage à trois, to Nesbit’s humiliation, though she accepted Bland’s terms and allowed him to bed her friend in the next room. Nesbit assumed that she was protecting her family by allowing Bland to sip from his exotic appetite for sex, but it became another matter when Hoatson became pregnant in 1886.  

It is, perhaps, not coincidental that this was the same year that she began writing horror stories, beginning with her masterpiece, “Man-Size in Marble,” (about a loving marriage which is destroyed following a husband’s patronizing dismissal of his wife’s intuition). Nesbit was completely distraught, flew into a rage, and demanded that his pregnant lover not be allowed to live in her house and eat at the same table as her children.

Bland coolly informed her that he would leave her and the children if she stood by her objections, and a heartbroken Nesbit accepted his terms. Hoatson gave birth to a girl, Rosamund, whom Nesbit dutifully adopted. When Alice became pregnant again thirteen years later, Nesbit raised no complaints, quietly adopting this baby also. Like the victim of a cuckoo-bird, she raised both children as if they were hers.  

Bland continue to be chronically adulterous, unapologetically sexist, and unrepentantly dismissive of women’s rights in spite of his wife’s public status as bread winner in their home. He died in 1914. Following Hubert’s death, Alice continued to live on the fringes of the family. Nesbit did not cut her off entirely, but there’s no clear record of a warm reconciliation or change in their complex dynamic.

The household likely remained strained. Edith remarried in 1917 to a Catholic, working-class marine engineer named Thomas Terry Tucker. After years of emotional triangulation this new marriage offered Nesbit something she’d long been denied: emotional calm and loyalty. 

The couple settled in St. Mary’s Bay in Kent, where Nesbit focused on her writing and gardening, both of which brought her joy. During this period, her literary output slowed, but she remained involved in storytelling and correspondence. Friends noted that Tucker was devoted and supportive, even as Nesbit’s health declined due to lung cancer. He cared for her in her final years until her death in 1924. 

While this marriage didn’t have the fiery passion or drama of her earlier years, it seemed to provide something far rarer in Nesbit’s life: peace, steadiness, and emotional safety—perhaps a fitting final chapter for someone who had spent so much of her life juggling affection, betrayal, and artistic brilliance.

Ultimately, then, Nesbit was able to have the kind of two-sided romance for which she had so often longed. Alice Hoatson continued to live with Nesbit after Bland’s death – largely out of respect for Rosamund – but their relationship never recovered from the scandal. Hoatson never married and died in obscurity in 1944. 

HAUNTED HEARTS AND HIDDEN WOUNDS:

HOW WRITING HORROR BECAME NESBIT'S CATHARSIS 

During her years with Bland – simmering as she was with pain, humiliation, and stifled rage – Nesbit pored herself into the two very distinct genres of writing that suited the two distinct parts of her already polarized life: the children’s literature which was inspired by her maternal love for her daughter and two boys and the supernatural horror which expressed both the agony of her married life and the many anxieties and traumatic memories of her idiosyncratic childhood. Nesbit once said that her ghost stories were written "to amuse myself when I was too tired to write anything more serious."

That’s a modest claim, but the emotional power and biographical parallels of her horror stories suggest deeper motivations. Scholars and biographers often interpret her interest in the supernatural as a psychological outlet—a place to explore anxieties, betrayals, and emotional wounds that couldn't be expressed in her more lighthearted children's fiction.

Along with the many stories of treacherous couples, abandoned women, and sexual violence, historians and critics have noted that a number of details from traumatizing childhood memories and phobias – perhaps brought back to the surface of her imagination as she faced down the far more acute pain of her shared marriage – recur throughout her supernatural tales.  

 For a writer of cheery children’s novels, hers was a neurotic and apprehensive youth, riddled with recurring nightmares, phobias, and anxieties. One perennial phobia was a terror of being buried alive – a peculiarity she shared with one of her greatest literary influences, Edgar Allan Poe. This was reportedly inspired by the near escape of an uncle who – having been mistakenly declared dead following an attack of epilepsy – had been noticed twitching in his coffin during his funeral and revived just in time to avoid being laid in his grave.

Throughout her life this horrifying family lore plagued her imagination, and several of her stories (“The Five Drugs” and “The Third Drug” in particular) concern persons who are either paralyzed or otherwise restrained and threatened with a slow, agonizing death by thirst or suffocation. A related bête noire of hers that appeared in many of her most well-known tales was a lifelong terror of the idea of corpses reviving (cf. “John Charrington’s Wedding,” “From the Dead,” “Man-Size in Marble,” “In the Dark”).

This phobia – initiated by the story of her uncle’s near-internment – was only exacerbated by a fateful holiday trip where her parents took her to the burial pits at the Church of St. Michel in Bordeaux, France. The cellars had a particularly dry atmosphere that mummified the corpses stored there, creating a macabre tourist attraction (not unlike those described in “The Head” and “The Powers of Darkness”). For young Edith, however, the thrill was entirely overcome by deep anxiety. As an adult she described the encounter with death in stunning detail: 

“[They were] skeletons with the flesh hardened on their bones, with their long dry hair hanging on each side of their brown faces, where the skin in drying had drawn itself back from their gleaming teeth and empty eye-sockets. Skeletons draped in mouldering shreds of shrouds and grave-clothes, their lean fingers still clothed with dry skin, seemed to reach out to me. I was paralysed with horror… not daring to turn my head lest one of those charnel house faces should peep out at me… On the wall near the door I saw the dried body of a little child hung up by its hair…  it is to them, I think, more than to any other thing, that I owe nights and nights of anguish and horror, long years of bitterest fear and dread.” 

NESBIT’S OWN “HAUNTED INHERITANCE”: 

VICTORIAN SHADOWS IN

NESBIT'S LITERARY IMAGINATION

Another unmistakable influence on Nesbit’s emotionally-charged horror stories were a number of excellent mid-Victorian ghost story writers who were at the top of their game during her childhood and youth. The most noteworthy among these were four women – Rhoda Broughton, Amelia B. Edwards, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Margaret Oliphant – whose stories regularly feature innocent people who unexpectedly find themselves in peril from merciless supernatural forces. These authors helped shape the genre of supernatural fiction in the 19th century, and their atmospheric storytelling, psychological depth, and use of domestic or familiar settings left a strong impression on Nesbit.

Like them, Nesbit often approached the supernatural not with shock and gore, but with subtlety and emotional tension. For example, Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story” and Oliphant’s “The Open Door” blend ghostly occurrences with themes of memory, guilt, and unresolved trauma — all motifs that Nesbit would later explore in her own ghost stories. These women also carved out space for female voices in a male-dominated genre, offering an important model for Nesbit’s own literary ambitions. 

In so many of Nesbit’s best ghost stories, such as “Man-size in Marble” and “The Ebony Frame,” you can see echoes of the narrative restraint and psychological layering that defined the earlier writers' work. Like Edwards in “The Phantom Coach” and Broughton in “Behold, It Was a Dream!,” Nesbit relied on first-person narration, tension based on the characters’ need to resolve a problem in an important relationship, and an building atmosphere of dread to draw the reader into a personal, confessional space — heightening both suspense and intimacy.  

She was also adept at locating horror in familiar surroundings: peaceful villages, warm homes, or romantic relationships that gradually unravel into supernatural menace, much like Broughton (a honeymooners cottage becomes a gruesome crime scene), Edwards (a warm refuge on a deadly moor proves to be the home of a wild-eyed alchemist), Gaskell (an orphan is adopted into a grand manor house only to be menaced by predatory ghosts), and Oliphant (a family moves to the countryside for their son’s health only to have him be driven to the edge of death by a ghost boy) had done before her. By blending the eerie with the everyday and focusing on emotional resonance rather than sensationalism, Nesbit built on a tradition of ghost storytelling pioneered by these women, while giving it her own distinctive blend of wit, melancholy, and modern voice. 

Among her other significant, mid-Victorian influences were Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu. These authors, particularly known for their exploration of the supernatural, psychological suspense, and dark emotional undercurrents, helped shape the eerie atmosphere and emotional tension that sometimes surface in Nesbit’s fiction.

In her own ghost stories and supernatural tales — specifically those collected in Fear (1910) — Nesbit channels Poe’s sense of psychological dread and poetic melancholy. Like Poe, she often explores how fear and grief warp perception, crafting protagonists who are haunted not just by spirits, but by guilt, memory, or loss.  

Many of her stories – such as “From the Dead,” “In the Dark,” "John Charrington’s Wedding," “Uncle Abraham’s Romance,” “The Three Drugs,” “The Five Senses,” and “The Ebony Frame” echo Poe’s morbid, necrophiliac romanticism blurring the boundaries between love and death, while her use of unreliable narrators and slow-building tension nods to Poe’s subtle horror and psychological complexity in such classics as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat.” Indeed, several of her stories are obvious pastiches of Poe’s work, indulging in his favored themes of cursed families, live burials, decadent aristocrats, doppelgangers, and the corrupting influences of isolation and obsession, lust and revenge. 

Charles Dickens’ influence is especially evident in Nesbit’s sensitivity to class, domestic life, and the vulnerability of children. Dickens, known for infusing his tales with moral and emotional depth, as well as the supernatural (e.g., “The Signalman” and A Christmas Carol), offered a model for mixing sentiment with spectral unease.

Nesbit adopted a similar approach, especially in stories where the ghostly serves to highlight social injustice or emotional neglect, or – when mimicking the existential awe and ethical perplexity of “The Signalman” or “To Be Read at Dusk” – when supernatural tragedies befall earnest people without apparent reason (“Man-Size in Marble”) or when spectral warnings are delivered and heeded without allowing the seer to prevent the hideous outcome or an explanation for why they were chosen (“Mystery of the Semi-Detached”).  

Le Fanu’s influence can be traced in her choice of everyday settings that become sites of uncanny (often sexually-charged) intrusion by aggressive supernatural actors — a method she later perfected in her children’s fantasy, where the ordinary is frequently disrupted by the extraordinary.

Le Fanu’s stories typically concerned unrelenting, voyeuristic ghosts hellbent on either satisfying their lusts (“Schlaken the Painter,” “Ultor de Lacy”) or gleefully avenging themselves on the still-living enemies (“The Familiar,” “Mr. Justice Harbottle”) – tropes which are clearly expressed in “Man-Size in Marble,” “The Ebony Frame,” “From the Dead,” and “John Charrington’s Wedding” in the first case, and “In the Dark,” “The Head,” “The Powers of Darkness,” “The Shadow,” and “The Violet Car,” in the second.  

CRAFTING A DISTINCTIVE DARKNESS: 

NESBIT'S DEVELOPMENT AS A

MASTER OF SUBTLE HORROR

Together, these Gothic and supernatural writers offered Nesbit a toolkit for evoking the unknown in subtle, psychological ways, helping her craft tales that were not just about magic or ghosts, but about the human fears that give those forces power. But what she did with these tools was something uniquely and powerfully her own: she invested it with a raw, white-hot emotion.

Broughton and Oliphant certainly fueled their ghost stories with pathos, and Poe and Dickens certainly invested theirs with psychological vulnerability, but Nesbit’s level of agony is truly crushing in many of her stories – informed, of course, by her own experiences. David Stuart Davies aptly describes the connection between fiction and biography in Nesbit’s supernatural writing, using “Man-Size in Marble” as an exemplar:  

“Stylistically she was ahead of her time, for her tales are fierce, engaging and told in a modern fashion that demands attention… One interesting aspect of these exercises in terror and in a sense one that is typical of the woman and her background and beliefs is her ability to touch upon the deeper currents of eroticism and moral ambiguity involving her characters. Man-Size in Marble is probably the best known and most anthologized of Edith Nesbit’s stories… it epitomizes why she was so successful at the demanding art of telling a ghost story… The story is unremittingly savage, the prose is sharp and unfettered by overblown circumlocution and the ending is cruel and unhappy. There is an awful inevitability about the climax that one sees early on but we are held by a strange fascination to see where the narrative will take us. Nesbit never shirked from leaving the reader shocked, dismayed and abandoned. Life is cruel, she seems to be saying; you have no right to expect a happy ending. She may well have been applying that ideology to her own situation.” 

The cold brutality of fate is not limited to “Man-Size in Marble,” nor the theme of a romance dashed on the rocks of a universe indifferent to love, hope, and mercy. In “From the Dead,” a woman with good intentions is thrown out by her husband, and while his reaction is understandable, he is cast as a villain when she dies in childbirth mere hours before he finally locates her – and yet, that night, she crawls into his bed to attempt to beg his pardon one last time. In “John Charrington’s Wedding,” Nesbit’s second most famous work, we learn that the power of love can overcome death, but that by the transitive property, the power of death can overcome love – especially if that love be of a selfish, possessive spirit.

“The Ebony Frame” returns to the theme of love overcoming death: the lovely sitter of a portrait – a burned witch – has been waiting for almost three centuries to be reunited with the reincarnation of her lost lover, and finally they are, only to be once more and now eternally separated by a cruelly ironic twist of fate.

“The House of Silence” – an underappreciated masterpiece, one of Nesbit’s very best, rendered in the style of Lord Dunsany, Oliver Onions, and M. R. James – teaches a greedy burglar that a home lush in trappings and possessions may not be worth breaking into if it also happens to be a Bluebeard’s castle where an unsuspecting beauty has recently been wooed, bedded, and made food for the flies in short order. 

“Uncle Abraham’s Romance” is a soft and heartbreaking story of two misfits who find love beyond the grave, only – like so many of Nesbit’s protagonists – to lose it in a twist of bad timing and miscommunication. While investigating “The Mystery of the Semi-Detached,” a man involved in a casual affair sees a vision of his lover with her throat cut, strewn across her bed in a sexually suggestive way, moving him to reform – though not before a gruesome tragedy occurs in spite of his efforts.

“The Power of Darkness” uses a fateful bet, a love triangle, and a wax museum to address the inhuman lengths to which people will go to triumph in love, treating one man’s tragic insanity as mere collateral damage in the war for female attention – a pattern repeated in the imaginative plot of “The Pavilion,” where a vampiric plant stars as the murder weapon.  

Finally, there are “The Shadow,” “The Violet Car,” and “In the Dark” – three of Nesbit’s very best, most literary ghost stories, aside from “Man-Size in Marble” – each of which features remorseful conspirators beset by unforgiving specters who refuse to let them forget their shadowy involvement in three respective tragedies.

In “The Shadow” – written in the tradition of Henry James and Elizabeth Gaskell – a woman moves in with her married best friends to help with the wife’s recovery from a recent birth – but there are heavy secrets between the three, secrets which manifest into a shapeless, black phantom of guilt. 

In “The Violet Car” – written in the tradition of W. W. Jacobs and J. Sheridan Le Fanu – a pensioner and his wife struggle with their sanity after their daughter is run over by the eponymous roadster – a vehicle whose occupants are later killed when the old man intentionally gives them bad directions, and which returns to haunt and hunt him as a driverless, phantom car.

In “In the Dark” – written in the tradition of M. R. James and E. F. Benson – the protagonist murders a man who had revealed his sexual indiscretions to his fiancée (who killed herself in shame) but finds that the man’s corpse keeps catching up to him in dark rooms. and inescapable fate.  

Failed romance was always Nesbit’s favorite theme, and the harder the fall, the more she appeared to invest in her writing. The weakest of her stories usually involve a successful romance, although even the strongest of these tales tend to be weighed down by her irresistible taste for the maudlin and the sentimental. For instance, “From the Dead” features an obnoxiously melodramatic deathbed scene.

The wife runs away from home after the husband yells at her – after discovering that she had lied to him to break off his earlier engagement – and ends up dying in childbirth at an elderly couple’s cottage. The unforgiving old lady sermonizes against him, threatening to murder him, and championing the (entirely innocent) wife (who had lied to her about being married) as a paragon of virtue.

No one stops to ask if her overreaction to his understandable dismay at her deception has been worth dying (and endangering their child) for. There are similar lectures about the evils of animal testing (and the virtues of well-dressed, likeable, anti-vivisection women) in “The Five Senses” and even “The Shadow” – a masterpiece – dallies in this kind of cringey, preachy stuff, making a point to shame silly young girls for their shallowness while lionizing middle-aged spinsters as misunderstood martyrs. In general, it is common to find her stories skulked by tertiary characters who serve as Greek Choruses upbraiding insensitive husbands, dismissing attractive young women, and drumming up support for characters who bear an uncanny resemblance to the author (misunderstood wives, middle-aged women, and her political allies).

Of course, given her life experiences, it is understandable that Nesbit’s ire against her perceived haters and thirst for justification, validation, and sympathy should bleed into her writing. Nonetheless, it is a noteworthy blight on her otherwise excellent canon of ghost stories, and one which you will regularly encounter in this collection.  

The scholar Robert Hadji commented on this flaw and its ultimate redemption as a glaring weakness in an otherwise powerful oeuvre: “Nesbit’s work is at times crudely sensational and even vulgar, yet it is redeemed by its emotional sensitivity, its alienated female perspective, and the lyrical clarity of her prose style which is simple and sincere.”

Indeed, Nesbit seems to have regularly struggled to reconcile the competing voices crying out to be heard in her work: although she could be tenderly sentimental to the point of saccharine – inspired by her optimistic desire for family, belonging, and community – which could sometimes veer towards the maudlin and sappy – she was just as capable of swinging to the opposite extreme—writing with a severity so sharp and a cynicism so bleak that it bordered on the sadistic, revealing a worldview so warped and polluted by disillusionment that it becomes swamped with angsty melodrama. More often than not, however, her stories met in the middle, resulting in an passionately rich, spiritually haunting stew of emotion: rejection, love, hate, powerlessness, and pride. 

NESBIT'S THREE FACES OF FEAR: 

DOOMED ROMANCE, DARK VISIONS,

AND SCIENCE FICTION

Nesbit’s macabre fiction can be classified into approximately three categories. First among these are her stories of Doomed Romance: straight-forward ghost stories that brood over tragic separations, frustrated longing between mortals and spirits, and lovers who are either torn apart by supernatural interference, or haunted by the memories and implications of their inability to stay together.

Among these are the classics “Man-Size in Marble” and “John Charrington’s Wedding,” the lesser-known gems “From the Dead,” “Uncle Abraham’s Romance,” and “The Ebony Frame,” and her under-appreciated masterpiece “The Shadow.” The tone of these stories is elegiac and bittersweet, with moments of quiet horror that arise from human longing and missed chances. Through richly detailed settings and restrained narration, Nesbit evokes a world where love and loss blur the line between the natural and the supernatural, making the stories both touching and haunting. 

The second category – what I will term Dark Visions – involve a wide-range of startling experiences which rattle and transform their protagonists. Among these are two masterful ghost stories (“The Violet Car” and “In the Dark”), two Hitchcockian, psychological thrillers (“The Head” and “The Power of Darkness”), two mysterious stories about clairvoyant visions (“The Mystery of the Semi-Detached” and “The Mass for the Dead”), two Gothic farces which are resolved in a humorous détente (“The Haunted Inheritance” and “Number 17”), and yet another under-appreciated masterpiece, the ambiguously supernatural, Dunsanian thriller “The House of Silence.” These varied tales feature murders, haunted houses, enigmatic prophecies, and narrow escapes from perilous hazards, all conveyed with Nesbit’s signature wit, elegance, and psychological subtlety.

Though her endings often feature a gruesome, difficult-to-forget jump-scare (a match-flare in an empty room reveals the gore-splattered corpse of a girl ravished in her bed; a smiling man cuts his throat with a razor while making eye contact; a dead woman hidden in tall grass, is stepped on, disturbing the hoard of buzzing flies covering her face) her overall tone is rarely grotesque or overtly macabre; instead, it’s atmospheric and quietly chilling, focusing on the slow unraveling of normalcy as characters confront the inexplicable.

These stories patiently draw their readers into an intimate and believable world where rationality is tested by ghostly phenomena or moral reckoning. Their horror lies not just in the actual hauntings, visions, or killings, but in the emotional and moral implications of the protagonists’ own responses to those same events.   

Finally – and perhaps most unexpectedly – there are Nesbit’s sci-fi thrillers. Though there were not quite ten of them (most of which are printed here, including “The Third Drug,” “The Five Senses,” “The Pavilion,” and “The Haunted House”) their uniqueness merits us taking a sidebar to unpack her role in the genre’s early development. It wasn’t until quite late in Nesbit’s life that sci-fi became an element of her portfolio, but she began to experiment with (and later, playfully indulge in) it during the final decade of her career.

The three sci-fi novels and half-a-dozen stories she generated were strongly influenced by her personal friend and political associate, H. G. Wells. Both authors incorporated scientific ideas, often speculative, into their stories. Wells, famous for The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, used advanced technology and evolutionary theory as central themes. Nesbit, in stories like The Story of the Amulet and The House of Arden, included time travel and futuristic visions, often with a mix of mystical elements.

Wells frequently used science fiction to critique society, addressing themes of imperialism (The War of the Worlds), class struggle (The Time Machine), and unchecked scientific ambition (The Island of Dr. Moreau).  

Nesbit, though more subtle, also incorporated social themes into her works, particularly through depictions of economic inequality and critiques of power structures, often wrapped in an adventurous or fantastical narrative. And her work, though slight, has been well-received for its creativity and creepiness. E. F. Bleiler – the dean of speculative fiction anthologists – notably included four of her six sci-fi tales in his gargantuan compendium (just two pages shy of 1000), Science Fiction: the Early Years. 

Printed in this anthology are four science fiction tales that flirt with the legacies of Dr Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll, and Dr Moreau: blood-sucking vines, superhuman drugs, diabolical genetics, labs filled with the bodies of experimented-on victims, science-based vampirism, and even a feeble-minded lab assistant in the vein of the Universal Films’ hunchback, Igor.  

CONCLUSIONS 

Nesbit’s writing is powerful – at times genuinely poetic – and her legacy as both a children’s writer and a master of horror is well deserved, if not far overdue. The stories in this book can best be described as raw – emotionally wringing, cruel, and richly ironic – but they are at times very tender, even in the harshest of her stories. While her worldview is cynical – at times nearly Lovecraftian – there is no doubt that at the core of her horror beats a heart – tremendously bruised, horribly misused, and shamefully denied a voice.  

But Nesbit’s tales give voice to that heart, and its fleshy beat can be detected in the sorrow of “Man-Size in Marble,” the regret of “The Shadow,” the grief of “The Violet Car,” the toxic love of “John Charrington’s Wedding,” the anxiety of “In the Dark,” the revulsion of “The House of Silence,” the helplessness of “The Semi-Detached,” and the heartbreak of “Uncle Abraham’s Romance.”  

So as you turn this page and step into Nesbit’s universe, anticipate a world of painful loss and emotional vulnerability; anticipate a world of hate and love, affection and anxiety, guilt and hope; anticipate a world of sex and violence; anticipate a world of possessive aggression and intimate horror – anticipate the world of Edith Nesbit. 

You can find our annotated and illustrated collection of Nesbit's best ghost stories HERE!

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