Volume 56, Number 13 · August 13, 2009
Messing About with 'The Wind in the Willows'
By Michael Dirda
The Annotated Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame, edited with a preface and notes by Annie Gauger
Norton, 384 pp., $39.95
The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition
by Kenneth Grahame, edited by Seth Lerer
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 273 pp., $35.00
Kenneth Grahame (1859–1932)—who nearly called his most famous book The Wind in the Reeds —led one of those multiple lives so beloved of late Victorians: secretary of the Bank of England, contributor to the decadent Yellow Book, gently ironic celebrant of childhood in The Golden Age (1895) and Dream Days (1898). (The most famous section of the latter is the enchanting satire 'The Reluctant Dragon'—about a poetry-spouting dragon and a highly civilized Saint George.) A resolute amateur of letters, Grahame refused to become a professional writer, holding himself to be 'a spring not a pump.'
Review, 3722 words
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