E. Nesbit (1858-1924) was a popular and influential English author of children's adventure stories. Her real name was Edith Bland (née 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:
Other works by E. Nesbit provide examples of:
- The All Concealing I: Attempted by the narrator of The Story of the Treasure Seekers, not very effectively; the narrator is a child and is only concealing their identity as a game for the reader.
- Author Avatar: In-universe in The Story of the Treasure-Seekers: when the kids are alternating chapters of a serial story, Noel names the hero "Noeloninuris". When Oswald gets a chapter, he retcons the name to "Osrawalddo".
- 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.
- It Was Here I Swear: The end of "The Caves and the Cockatrice"
- Moustache de Plume, ambiguous initials subtype
- Narrator All Along: Played for Laughs in The Story of the Treasure Seekers. The narrator keeps praising one of the main characters as being so clever and brave, and how it isn't his fault when things go wrong. Then the narrator begins forgetting to use the grammatical third person...
- Nurse With Good Intentions: In The Story of the Treasure Seekers, the kids decide they want to invent medicine. So they try goofing around in the cold until one of them gets sick. Eventually, one of them does and they try to give him all sorts of medicines...but none work and he just gets worse. Needless to say, the adult who discovers this mess is not amused.
- 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.
- Relative Error: In The Wouldbegoods; lampshaded by the narrator.
He might have known it was her brother, because in rotten grown-up books if a girl kisses a man in a shrubbery that is not the man you think she's in love with; it always turns out to be a brother.
- Unreliable Narrator: The narrator of The Story of the Treasure Seekers and its sequels.
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