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    A Study Guide for Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows"
    A Study Guide for Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows"
    A Study Guide for Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows"
    Ebook40 pages32 minutes

    A Study Guide for Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 14, 2016
    ISBN9781535840552
    A Study Guide for Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows"

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      A Study Guide for Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows" - Gale

      1

      The Wind in the Willows

      Kenneth Grahame

      1908

      Introduction

      The Wind in the Willows was published near the turn of the century—1908 in England and 1909 in America. It was based on stories that Kenneth Grahame, the author, told to his son Alastair, starting on Alastair's fourth birthday. The principle characters of these stories are talking animals who live in and around a river, though to the animals, it is "the River" (author's emphasis). At the time of the work's publication, Grahame had already published four books of fiction. He was most well known for his collections of stories The Golden Age and its sequel Dream Days. Though the works were written about children, they were not written for children. The Wind in the Willows was not initially well received because it deviated from his previous works; however, it eventually became the work that he is most famous for, enjoyed by children and adults alike.

      The principle characters in the novel, though they all have their faults, are idealized in many ways. Several virtues are epitomized in Mole, Rat, Badger, and Toad, so much so that they become themes. There are numerous examples of hospitality, forgiveness, compassion, generosity, and humility. Even the arrogant Toad is able to humble himself and put aside his conceited ways in the end, having matured though a succession of trying circumstances with the guidance and help of loyal friends.

      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.

      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

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