Kenneth Grahame ca 1910. Retrieved from Wikipedia, public domain (accessed: February 2, 2022).
Kenneth Grahame
, 1859 - 1932
Kenneth Grahame was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. His mother died of puerperal fever when he was five, and his father sent him and his siblings to be cared for by their grandmother, in the village of Cookham, in Berkshire, England. He and his sister and brothers grew up in an idyllic rural setting, near the River Thames, where an uncle introduced them to boating. At the age of 20, Grahame was sent to work in the Bank of England, where he was promoted through the ranks, becoming Secretary. He retired in 1908, owing to ill health. He married Elspeth Thomson in 1899, and they had a child, a boy named Alastair. Grahame told Alastair bedtime stories, which he later turned into his best-known work, The Wind in the Willows (1908). Alastair, partially blind, frail and quirky, struggled to fit in with his peers, and died of suicide at the age of twenty. Grahame’s writing career includes stories published in London periodicals, collected as Pagan Papers (1893), The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898). He died in 1938, in Pangbourne, Berkshire.
Sources:
Lyndall Gordon, Dark-hearted dreamer: the double life of Kenneth Grahame, newstatesman.com, published November 7, 2018 (accessed: December 30, 2020).
en.wikipedia.org (accessed: December 30, 2020).
britannica.com (accessed: December 30, 2020).
Bio prepared by Elizabeth Hale, University of New England, ehale@une.edu.au
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