The unquenchable brilliance of E Nesbit

E Nesbit, the author of The Railway Children, was such an inspiration to Kate Saunders that she decided to write a sequel to Five Children and It

Sally Thomsett, Gary Warren and Jenny Agutter in The Railway Children, adapted from E Nesbitt’s classic novel. Photograph: Allstar/EMI/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Kate Saunders

Tuesday 18 August 2015  The Guardian

When I first came across my inspiration, E Nesbit, I wasn’t aware that I was being inspired. I was a child and she was the shadowy author behind some of my favourite books - The Railway Children, The Story of the Treasure-Seekers, Five Children and It. Somehow, though these books were written in the Edwardian age and I was reading them in the 1960s, it never occurred to me that they were in any way old-fashioned. Nesbit’s voice is surprisingly contemporary, and when I read (and re-read) her books, I loved the sense that she was talking directly to me, with entertainment as her sole purpose.
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