Although it has often been pointed out that The Wind in the Willows (1908), Kenneth Grahame's most enduring work, presents an idealized portrait of rural nineteenth-century England, Edmund Little in The Fantasts: Studies in J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Mervyn Peake, Nicolai Gogol, and Kenneth Grahame (1984) includes him among a group of writers who have created "unreal worlds." According to Lois R. Kuznets, Grahame's novel is an animal fantasy in which animals and humanity live quietly in close proximity, with the animals conversing, dressing, and living like humans in a seamless conjunction of the real and the unreal. It also develops out of his earlier work and from a life that may seem at first glance too prosaic to support it.

Kenneth Grahame, the second son and third child of Bessie Ingles and James Cunningham Grahame, was born on 8 March 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland. When he was about a...