SOURCE: "Kenneth Grahame (1920)" in Art & Reality, Janet Anderson, Graham Cullum, Kimon Lycos, eds., Hale & Iremonger, 1982, pp. 157-61.

In the following essay, Anderson discusses the characteristics of Grahame's prose style.

Kenneth Grahame's writing belongs to what might be called the literature of the countryside. Not only does it deal with the significance of common things, of growth, of open-air delights; it draws attention to the way in which the countryside is significant in history. These qualities are to be found also in Chesterton and Belloc, the latter of whom has enshrined them in the poem at the end of The Four Men:

He does not die that can bequeath
 Some influence to the land he knows,
 Or dares, persistent, interwreath
 Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;
     He does not die, but still remains
     Substantiate with his darling plains.

George Bourne, in his Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer, makes it...