The Enchanted Castle

Stranded at school over the summer holidays, Gerald, Jimmy, and Kathleen go exploring and discover, beyond a maze in the grounds of a great house, a sleeping girl they take for an enchanted princess. She is really Mabel, the housekeeper's niece — but the ring she shows them is no game. When she puts it on, she vanishes; and the ring will not come off, and no one knows how long the spell will last.

From that first miscalculation the magic spins outward, and the central joke of the book is that nobody can ever predict what the ring will do. The children call it a wishing ring, and for a while it is; then it is something else entirely. It makes people invisible against their will. It conjures a crowd of spectators out of nothing to fill the empty seats at a children's play — and those spectators are the Ugly-Wuglies, figures the children have built from coats and sticks and painted-paper faces, who proceed, hideously, to come alive. Every wish is granted with a literal, alarming exactness, and every one leaves the children scrambling to undo what they have done.

Funny, fast, and genuinely eerie, The Enchanted Castle is the boldest of E. Nesbit's fantasies — the one in which her comedy opens out into real awe and dread. Beneath the farce of fake princesses and unspendable gold runs a quieter, vaster enchantment: statues that move by moonlight, great stone gods that come down to feast, and the dawning knowledge that the world is larger and stranger than the nursery ever promised.

The Ugly-Wuglies are among the most frightening inventions in all of children's literature, and the book's mixture of wonder and fear drew later fantasists to it above her others. C. S. Lewis admired Nesbit and learned from her, and readers of Narnia will recognise the lineage in her waking statues and her children crossing from ordinary life into a great old magic.