The Wind in the Willows | Author Biography

Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on March 8, 1859, the third of four children to James Cunningham and Bessie Ingles Grahame. When Grahame was just five years old, his mother contracted scarlet fever and died. James Grahame “never recovered from the loss of his wife and did virtually nothing to help his children recover from it,” as Kuznets says in Kenneth Grahame, and the Grahame children moved with their maternal grandmother, Granny Ingles, to Cookham Dene, a town in Berkshire, along the Thames River.

Kenneth Grahame
Kenneth Grahame

At age nine, Grahame began school at St. Edward’s School in Oxford with his older brother Willie. Here, Grahame excelled at both academics and athletics and still had “time to roam the gardens of Oxford and to continue his loving relationship with the river Thames, which runs through Oxford as it does through Cookham Dene, and indeed through most of Grahame’s life,” as Kuznets states in her biography. Although Grahame was an accomplished scholar, his family refused to further his education, and at age 16, he ended his schooling and applied for a clerkship at the Bank of England in London.

Banker’s hours were short in London, and Grahame participated in the London Scottish Regiment drills, volunteered at Toynbee Hall, served as honorary secretary of the Shakespeare Society, and explored the city and the countryside. Shortly after his father’s death in 1887, Grahame began to submit his writing for publication, usually anonymously. His description of the Berkshire Downs, “By a Northern Furrow,” was published in December of 1888 and is the first published piece definitively attributed to Grahame. The following decade was a productive one for Grahame’s writing. He published Pagan Papers (1893), The Golden Age (1895), The Headswoman (1898), and Dream Days (1898), as well as many essays and stories.

On July 22, 1899, the forty-year-old Grahame married Elspeth Thomson, despite the disapproval of their family and friends. Their only child, Alastair, was born on May 12, 1900. In 1906, the Grahames moved back to Cookham Dene, and Grahame commuted to work until he resigned in 1908, citing health problems.

The origin of The Wind in the Willows dates back to 1904, when Grahame began telling bedtime stories featuring a mole, a giraffe (later replaced by Toad), and a rat to celebrate Alastair’s fourth birthday. After some urging by Constance Smedley of the American magazine Everybody’s, Grahame collected the stories into a single manuscript. The Wind in the Willows was initially rejected by publishers as “it was apparently written for children, not for adults who wanted to reminisce about childhood,” as Kuznets says, but was eventually published in 1908. The Wind in the Willows became a classic children’s book, and A. A. Milne later used the novel as the basis for the play Toad of Toad Hall, produced in 1930.

Grahame wrote little after the publication of The Wind in the Willows. His next published work after The Wind in the Willows was a 1913 essay, “The Fellow That Goes Alone,” about the joys of solitude in country life. Grahame enjoyed country living and non-literary pursuits in his later years, but he was troubled by circulatory problems, the strains of his marriage, and the death of their son in 1920. On July 6, 1932, Grahame died in his home in Pangbourne of a cerebral hemorrhage.