Although she does not write fantasy, I think the works of Polly Horvath, My One Hundred Adventures is her most recent, are perfect examples of this. As I have said in other reviews, the real challenge is to write a complete story with detailed characters who live in a fully visualized universe in less than 200 pages. I firmly believe that there is almost no reason to write a book over 300 pages for children and I am suspect of those that hover around 500 pages. In the service of exciting plots and rich, new fantasy worlds, many writers for children have forgotten how evocative a few well turned words, rather than paragraphs and paragraphs of description, can be. I think that this quote is the perfect example of that. 7) One of the things I love most about literature that is fifty plus years old is the quality of the writing and the care taken with the words. He has the 'immense liberty of a desolate, empty sort.' ( The Magic City, p. When Philip is rude to Lucy's auntie as well, Lucy is whisked away so that she will not be subjected to this horrid boy. Helen and her new husband set off on their honeymoon leaving the children in the care of Lucy's nurse and the servants.

Phillip is shocked and sullen and does not make a good impression upon arriving at The Grange after the wedding. They have an idyllic life until the day she announces that she is marrying her childhood sweetheart and they will move to his home, the Grange, where they will live with him and his daughter, Lucy. The story begins with Philip, an orphan, who is being raised by his doting half-sister Helen, twenty years his senior. She cites a 1958 article Eager wrote for the HornBook Magazine of children's literature in which he admires what he calls the 'dailiness of the magic' in Nesbit's books and referrs to his own writings as 'second-rate Nesbit.' In her 2002 article linking George Balanchine's production of The Nutcracker to the works of Nesbit and Eager, who himself was a minor figure in the New York theatre scene of the 1940s, Mimi Kramer emphasizes the influence of Nesbit on Eager's writings for children. CS Lewis went so far as to mention the Bastable children, characters from Nesbit's The Treasure Seekers, in his book The Magician's Nephew. She is a known influence to CS Lewis and Edward Eager, author of the fabulous Half Magic, among others, both of whom published their children's fantasy novels some forty years after Nesbit. Born in England in 1858, Nesbit lived until 1924 and published most of her children's books between 18.

Edith Nesbit is perhaps one of the greatest, most influential writers of children's literature that you have never heard of.

The magic city edith nesbit