Reviewing Edith Nesbit's verse collection Leaves of Life (1888) in the Socialist periodical To-Day (January 1889), popular novelist Adeline Sergeant singled out for praise Nesbit's "passionate sympathy," her "fine enthusiasm for splendid deeds," and her "strong and tender feeling," concluding, "She has the gift of inward vision." Nesbit was struggling at the time to support her family through hack writing and to establish herself as an important Victorian woman poet, the equal of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. Yet while she gained a measure of evanescent fame for her verse--accolades from Algernon Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, as well as admission to Who's Who as "poet and novelist" in 1897--the stories and novels she wrote in middle life, from The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) to Wet Magic (1913), won her lasting renown as one of the greatest Edwardian fantasists for children. Nesbit's children's writings rather than her poetry best...