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Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. When he was not yet five, his mother died of scarlet fever, after which he was sent to his maternal grandmother's house at Cookham Dean near the Thames. His father virtually abandoned his children to relatives, and Kenneth was sent to boarding school in Oxford at the age of nine. Disappointed of his dream of going on to university, he was instead given a job as a clerk in the Bank of England, where ultimately he became Secretary. He achieved fame as a writer with his recollections of childhood, The Golden Age and Dream Days published in 1895 and 1898. The Wind in the Willows, turned down by several publishers as a poor sequel to the earlier books, began as a bedtime story told to his only child, Alistar, whose tragic death at twenty was so great a sorrow that he and his wife lived in eccentric seclusion thereafter. In a life of much sadness it seems that all he found pleasurable in this world he put into the best-loved children's book of all time.
Does The Wind in the Willows <\i>need an annotated edition? Suggesting that Grahame's prose, encrusted with the patina of age and affect, has become an obstacle to full appreciation of the work, Lerer offers the text with running disquisitions in the margins on now-archaic words and phrases, Edwardian social mores and a rich array of literary references from Aesop to Gilbert and Sullivan. Occasionally he goes over the top - making, for instance, frequent references alongside Toad's supposed mental breakdown to passages from Kraft-Ebing's writings on clinical insanity - and, as in his controversial Children's Literature, a Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter <\i>(2008), displays a narcissistic streak: This new edition brings The Wind in the Willows<\i>...into the ambit of contemporary scholarship and criticism on children's literature... Still, the commentary will make enlightening reading for parents or other adults who think that there's nothing in the story for them - and a closing essay on (among other topics) the links between Ernest Shepard's art for this and for Winnie the Pooh <\i>makes an intriguing lagniappe. (selective resource list) (Literary analysis. Adult/professional) <\i> (Kirkus Reviews)
