The Man in the Willows

December 15, 2018
A biography of the author of The Wind in the Willows.First published in 1908, The Wind in the Willows has endured as a beloved children's classic and has also gained a devoted adult readership. The story, which celebrates the pastoral delights found in the rural English countryside as experienced through the friendship of four anthropomorphized animals, originated as a series of bedtime stories told by Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) to his son. Grahame's vivid descriptions of the natural setting harkened back to memories of his own childhood wanderings. Though much of Grahame's writing for children is joyful, his personal life, as described in this latest biography by Dennison (Over the Hills and Far Away: The Life of Beatrix Potter, 2017, etc.), was often bleak. Grahame's mother died when he was young, and after living briefly with his unstable, alcoholic father, he and his siblings were sent to live with their grandmother in a rural home known as The Mount. He would often revisit this idyllic setting in his imagination throughout much of his adult life, inspiring many of his stories. But disappointment and loss continued to haunt Grahame as an adult. He was coerced by his guardian to take on a bank job rather than attend university, leading to lonely years in London beholden to a banking career while pursuing his writing interests. A late marriage would lead to further unhappiness, as their only child committed suicide before he was 20. Sadly, Dennison does little to enliven his portrait of Grahame. While respectful and not entirely unsympathetic, the author's treatment feels like a commissioned exercise. His prose style is overly fusty, and Grahame's portrait lacks the psychological probing one expects with contemporary scholarship. For instance, Dennison neglects to explore his subject's sexual identity. Though a biographer is unlikely to prove that Grahame was a homosexual, this aspect of his personality has been strongly considered by other recent scholars.A stale exploration of a nearly forgotten writer, offering little to enhance Grahame's relevancy for modern readers.

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Starred review from January 1, 2019
Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932), author of the beloved children's classic The Wind in the Willows, led a double life: one was in the workaday world where he was secretary of the Bank of England, one of the bank's top three administrative positions, while the other was in his mind, which was filled with fantasy, the same imagined world to which he had retreated as an unloved child. His mother died when he was very young, and his father then abandoned him and his siblings. Aside from a brief reconciliation, he never saw the man again. The Grahame children were sent to live with their forbidding grandmother and were watched over by their dour, parsimonious Uncle John. The one positive thing that emerged from this experience was Grahame's acutely fond memories of his grandmother's country house, the Mount. Perhaps accordingly, Grahame was always more interested in place than in people. Beginning to write as an adult, he produced the essays that inform the pages of his first two books The Golden Age and Dream Days, which brought him celebrity. Grahame's life was not notably happy, though. A confirmed bachelor who loved the solitary life, he married at 40, and the union was a disaster. Seeking escape again, he wrote his magnum opus, The Wind in the Willows, a celebration of male friendship and a paean to the natural world (Grahame was a pantheist). Dennison's account of all this is sympathetic but honest, psychologically acute and insightful. It is, withal, a sad story but one that Dennison tells extremely well to his and Grahame's credit.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)