Kenneth Grahame | 1859-1932 Kenneth Grahame was the cousin of Sir Anthony Hope, who wrote the swashbuckling Victorian masterpiece The Prisoner of Zenda. Grahame's own Edwardian masterpiece, The Wind in the Willows, could hardly be more distant in spirit and substance from its cousin. Even in the 1890s, Grahame had already moved away from the adventure story epitomized by Hope's novel. His Dream Days (1895) and Golden Age (1898) were minor successes, critically praised at the time for their realistic portrait of childhood, filtered through the sharp eyes and sensible voice of their child narrators. A Scotsman by birth and a banker by profession, Grahame approached his writing from the periphery of the literary world. The Wind in the Willows, with its vivid characters of Rat, Badger, Mole, and Toad and their life on the riverbank, was originally not intended for publication but rather as a collection of stories for his son. Published in 1908, The Wind in the Willows became considerably more popular with A.A. Milne's 1930 stage version of it, Toad of Toad Hall. In 1916, Grahame edited The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children, but he wrote no more original work after that (the death of his only child, in 1918, led Grahame into a retiring existence until his own death). For decades, The Wind in the Willows has been considered one of the finest examples of the idealization of the English countryside so central to Edwardian children's literature; Beatrix Potter and Milne are the two other premier practitioners of this 20th-century pastoral. But some critics view Grahame's idealization as a form of the author's resistance to English mores, suggesting that his animals cavorting along the river represent a pagan freedom frowned upon by the Victorian standards of behavior and belief still largely in place when Grahame was writing.