A Third Generation of E. Nesbit Biography

Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 Holroyd has focused on the Oedipal, the romantic, the genital. In building a psychological analysis on the ninety-nine percent of Shaw that involved common denominators he humanizes the monster but also trivializes the genius. Neglecting to integrate adequately the extraordinary one percent, Holroyd, for all his lively skills, succumbs to Freudianitis. Were he to peruse a bit of Jung, or the selfactualizing perspectives of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, he might find an antidote—perhaps some clues about the fraction that made Shaw's temperament, consciousness, and talent distinctive. Though it is elusive, that fraction appears in the heroes of Shaw's novels and, finally, in aesthetic complexities of his plays, subjects that Holroyd taps but briefly. Thus while this volume adroitly synthesizes information and corrects Shavian misinformation, its limitations leave fabric for clever tailors in other shops. Charles A. Berst U.C.L.A. A THIRD GENERATION OF E. NESBIT BIOGRAPHY Julia Briggs. A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924. New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1988. $27.95 THE STUDY OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE has only recently moved into academic territory. None of its scholarly journals has yet reached voting age—the oldest, Children's Literature in Education, dates only from 1969. Entire genres remain virtually unexplored, and basic biographies have yet to be written for authors whose historical importance is unquestioned in the field. The first full-length biography of the classic Edwardian author of children's fantasy and family stories, E. Nesbit (the pen name of Edith Bland) was thus a pioneering venture on its first publication in 1933. Yet its timing was excellent. Nesbit had died in 1924. In the early 30s, her children and her second husband were still alive, as well as many of her close friends. At the same time, the pious reticence of nineteenth-century biography was giving way to a twentieth-century taste for the whole truth. The biographer, Doris Langley Moore, was herself in her twenties, a child of the new century, and well aware that candor "had become a required feature of serious biography." Indeed, candor was to prove essential for even an approximation of Nesbit's story. Nesbit, investigated, was not at all the wise, calm, motherly personage her young biographer had imagined; she still startles those 475 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 with unconscious expectations of what a writer for children should be. Moody, quick-tempered, a tomboy who loved swimming and bicycling and a highly attractive woman, Nesbit was also a Bohemian who kept her curly hair cut short, smoked incessantly, and wore corsetless, flowing gowns. She and her journalist husband, Hubert Bland, were Socialists, founding members of the Fabian Society. She was seven months pregnant with her first child, Paul, on her wedding day, and her married life was punctuated by a succession of love affairs —though perhaps only in response to Hubert's far more spectacular philanderings. Of their four children, for example, two were not hers but the offspring of Hubert and Alice Hoatson, their companionhousekeeper ; Edith chose to bring them up as her own. As Bernard Shaw, a close friend and onetime lover, put it to Moore, "ΈαιίΕ ι was an audaciously unconventional lady and Hubert an exceedingly unfaithful husband.'" He did not see '"how a presentable biography is possible as yet.'" Faced with this series of startling revelations, Moore found herself forced to compromise—to leave out, for one thing, Hubert's liaison with the still-living Alice Hoatson. But she retained intact her mass of material—transcripts of letters to and from Nesbit, her own correspondence with Nesbit's family and friends, transcripts of the interviews she had taken down verbatim in shorthand—and thirtyfive years later, she felt able to complete her task. Her revised and much expanded version of E. Nesbit: A Biography was published in 1966 (Chilton Books). It contained the facts about Paul Bland's birth and Alice Hoatson's children that she had previously concealed, as well as new information by Nesbit herself, from a collection of magazine articles called "My School-Days." Again, the timing was excellent . The revised biography helped set standards of...