![]() ![]() The tragedy of Mouse was the culmination of an arc begun in Grahame’s own childhood. The 19-year old prostrated himself on a railroad track and allowed a train to decapitate him. In 1920, Grahame’s son - whom he called “Mouse” - died in what seemed to be a suicide. The pain, I discovered, comes from Grahame’s own life, from his frustrations and fears, his thwarted ambitions and mistakes in love. Returning to The Wind in the Willows in this way was like pressing an unexpected bruise. ![]() Even books that seek to recreate the gentle beauty and good humor of the original - such as William Horwood’s Tales of the Willows quartet (1993–1999) or Kij Johnson’s The River Bank (2017) - emphasize its flaws, such as the curious absence of major female characters. Jan Needle’s Wild Wood (1981) retells it in a way that reveals its class prejudices. Robert de Board’s Counselling for Toads (1998) presents Grahame’s story as a handbook of human pathologies. I’ve spent the last few months reading some of those tributes, discovering in the process a darkness just beneath the skin of my favorite children’s book. EVERY FAMOUS STORY inspires fan fiction, but Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) has inspired an unusual number of book-length extensions and reinterpretations. ![]()
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