Much to my surprise, I’ve just discovered that the famous children’s writer, Edith Nesbitt, was a literary convert. I have no idea why this fact has escaped my attention until now. I was alerted to the fact by a correspondent. Here’s the text of his e-mail:

Hello Joseph,

I’ve been poking around the internet to find info about Edith Nesbit, since we had read The Magic City to the kids and we all greatly enjoyed it (thinking about doing an illustrated version) but I knew she was a Fabian and socialist.

Turns out later in life she married a Catholic and eventually converted. I haven’t found anything more than that statement … just wondered if she wrote anything after she converted. Do you know anything about her conversion?

And here’s my reply:

Dear ____,

I urge you to buy the excellent book, Roads to Rome by John Beaumont (St. Augustine’s Press, 2010). It’s a mine of information about converts. Here’s some of the facts that I found out about Nesbit from Beaumont’s book. She married another convert, Hubert Bland, a fellow Fabian socialist with conservative leanings. Nesbitt was received into the Church in 1902, four years before the publication of her best-known work, The Railway Children. Amongst her friends were Robert Hugh Benson, Cecil Chesterton and Frederick Rolfe (a.k. Baron Corvo). She counted Bernard Shaw amongst her admirers.

I’m kicking myself that none of this came to my attention during the research for Literary Converts!

God bless,

Joseph