The Enchanted Castle - Misplaced Pages

1907 book by Edith Nesbit For the painting by Claude Lorrain, see Landscape with Psyche Outside the Palace of Cupid.

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The Enchanted Castle
First edition
Author	Edith Nesbit
Illustrators	H. R. Millar (1907) Cecil Leslie (1964) Paul O. Zelinsky (1992)
Language	English
Genre	Children's Literature
Publisher	Unwin
Publication date	1907
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (hardcover)

The Enchanted Castle is a children's fantasy novel by Edith Nesbit first published in 1907.

Plot summary

The enchanted castle of the title is a country estate in the West Country seen through the eyes of three children, Jerry, Jimmy, and Kathy, who discover it while exploring during the school holidays. The lake, groves and marble statues, with white towers and turrets in the distance, make a fairy-tale setting, and then in the middle of the maze in the rose garden, they find a sleeping fairy-tale princess.

The "princess" tells them that the castle is full of magic, and they almost believe her. She shows them the treasures of the castle, including a magic ring she says is a ring of invisibility, but when it actually turns her invisible she panics and admits that she is the housekeeper's niece, Mabel, and was just play-acting.

The children soon find that the ring has other magical powers such as making the "Ugly-Wugglies" (Guy Fawkes style dummies they had made to swell the audience at one of their play-performances) come to life. They eventually discover that the ring is actually granting their own wishes, and that the disturbing results stem from their failure to specify those wishes precisely.

The Enchanted Castle was written for both children and adults. It combines descriptions of the imaginative play of children, reminiscent of The Story of the Treasure Seekers, with a magic more muted than in her major fantasies such as The Story of the Amulet.

Adaptations

The Enchanted Castle was adapted into a TV-miniseries by the BBC in 1979. It has not been released on DVD or VHS in the UK: however, a DVD was released in Australia in 2013.

References

Stephen Prickett, Victorian Fantasy p 233 ISBN 0-253-17461-9

External links

The Enchanted Castle at Standard Ebooks
The Enchanted Castle at Project Gutenberg
The Enchanted Castle public domain audiobook at LibriVox
The Enchanted Castle at IMDb

v t e Works by E. Nesbit
Psammead trilogy	Five Children and It (1902) The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) The Story of the Amulet (1905)
Other well-known works	The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) The Wouldbegoods (1901) The Railway Children (1906) The Enchanted Castle (1907) Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare (1907) The House of Arden (1908) The Magic City (1910) The Magic World (1920)
Adaptations	The Railway Children (1970) Onegai! Samia-don (1985-86) The Treasure Seekers (1996) The Phoenix and the Carpet (1997 TV series) The Railway Children (2000) Five Children and It (2004) Four Kids and It (2020) The Railway Children Return (2022)

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