A Brown Study

I was having a bit of difficulty on this topic of ‘Brown Study’. I’d tried being very involved in my own thoughts and not paying attention to anything, or anyone, else. But that’s normal. I’d tried rooms and colours, corduroy trousers and the seasons. I was scrolling through the internet pages for an idea when I came across a poem by Edith Nesbit and read about the author.

 

illustration of Edith Nesbit by Julie Benbassat

This time the poem gave rise to the article. It has always been the other way round so it seems fair to start with it:

A Brown Study

Let them sing of their primrose and cowslip,
Their daffodil-gold-coloured hair,
Their bluebells, blue eyes, and white violets,
All the pale dreamy things they find fair;
Give me stir of brown leaves in the sunshine,
The whir of brown wings through the wheat,
The rush of brown hares through the clover,
And the light in brown eyes of my sweet!

Gold hair? Well, I never could love it,
Yet gold, I suppose, has its worth;
The head that I love is as dusky
As the breast of our mother, the earth;
With a gleam like the shine of wet seaweed,
Round pools that the tide has left clear,
And warm like the breast of a linnet,
And as brown, is the hair of my dear.

From the edge of the cliff we look downwards
On the shore, and the bay, and the town,
And brown is the short turf we lean on,
The fishing-boats' sails are all brown:
The sky may be blue--that's the background,--
But the picture itself, to be fair,
However it's shaded and varied,
Should be brown as the dress that you wear.

A lark bursts to sudden sweet singing--
That tuft of brown grass is his home--
And now, a brown speck, he is rising
Against the clear windy sky-dome;
And he sings--how I know? Love instructs me
To know all his notes, what they mean--
That it isn't the colour I care for,
But yourself, oh, my gipsy, my queen!

Ah! the lark knows my heart--I his language;
It's my heart he sings out to the skies;
It is you that I love, and what matter
The colour of hair or of eyes?
No doubt I should love you as dearly
Were your hair like an apricot's down,
And your eyes like the grey of the morning;
But I'm glad, all the same, that they're brown.

                                                            Edith Nesbit

If anyone had asked me about Edith Nesbit before reading about her then I might have remembered the name as the author of The Railway Children. Probably living in somewhere like Hampshire and writing poems like the above before she prepared dinner. How wrong can you be?

Sarah Watling in The Guardian writes that:
‘She was in person at once quite awe-inspiring and a bit of a nightmare, able to weather tragedy and yet a queen of melodrama, a self-supporting writer who opposed women’s suffrage. Vibrantly attractive and adored by her many proteges and readers, she was what they called in those days “advanced” – a committed socialist (she and her husband Hubert Bland were among the earliest members of the Fabian Society) who wore free-flowing clothes, gave charitably and wrote ferociously against poverty, and let her children play barefoot in the garden. Her home at Well Hall, in Eltham, was a lively hub for young writers, artists and Fabians; a place, HG Wells recalled, “to which one rushed down from town at the week-end to snatch one’s bed before anyone else got it”. She was generous with her time, her money and her husband.

Nesbit’s childhood was largely happy but nomadic. Her father, a distinguished chemist and teacher, died in 1862 when Edith was three, and from then the family moved around in reduced circumstances, taking regular trips abroad to cope with the ill health of an older sister, Mary, who died young. In 1880, the 21-year-old Edith married Bland, then a bank clerk. He was tall and athletic, powerful seeming. Nesbit herself was seven months pregnant when they married, a scandal at the time; their son, Paul, was born that summer. Two more children, Iris and Fabian, followed. Bland was never good with money; Nesbit supported the family by writing and by decorating greetings cards.

Edith Nesbit

The household was apparently always embroiled in “scenes”. Shortly after Iris’s birth, Nesbit discovered that Bland’s relationship with his previous fiancee was still going on (she had no idea about Edith). On his nights away from home, Nesbit’s friend, Alice Hoatson, kept her company. When a devastated Nesbit suffered a stillbirth, it was Hoatson who had to prise the dead baby from her arms; before long she had moved in permanently. They told people she had joined them because she was seriously ill; in fact she was heavily pregnant. Nesbit agreed to raise the child, a girl named Rosamund, as her own.

One way of understanding the menage a trois between Bland, Nesbit and Hoatson (who would have a second child with Bland, a son they pretended was Nesbit’s) is as a fruitful and long lasting collaboration between the two women. Nesbit was already an acclaimed poet by the time her children’s stories, often serialised in the Strand magazine, began to improve the family’s fortunes. The first Bastable book, ‘The Story of the Treasure Seekers’, appeared in 1899. The still-precarious family finances depended on Bland and Nesbit (they sometimes collaborated) churning out articles, stories and novels. Hoatson’s management of the home and children freed Nesbit to create. She generally set the tone. Her moods could plunge the whole household into gloom just as she enlivened everything when she was happy. Most agreed that Nesbit and Bland thrived on all the drama. But in 1900, the family came to grief when 15-year-old Fabian died after an operation to remove his adenoids and it seems that the adults were responsible.’

I think that gives some idea of the nature of Nesbit’s life, and how ironic that her married name was ‘Bland’.

Her tales of fantasy or magic influenced J. K. Rowling, C.S Lewis, Michael Moorcock, and Jacqueline Wilson, who has written her own sequel to “5 Children and It.” Noel Coward wrote to Noel Streatfeild, one of her biographers, of Edith’s “unparalleled talent for evoking the hot summer days in the English countryside.”

some of Edith Nesbit's many titles

After Hubert’s death in 1917 she met and married Tommy Tucker, a marine engineer, who had been friends with both of them and who had helped Edith overcome some financial problems. They found two wooden bungalows in New Romney, Kent where she died in May 1924.

Apologies for going more than a bit off topic but I found her story fascinating and I hope you do as well.

Terry Q.