The Wind in the Willows
1904 Grahame begins telling Alastair stories that will become The Wind in the Willows. In December J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is first performed on stage in London.1906 Grahame moves his family to Cookham Dene, where he grew up.1907 Grahame begins the manuscript for The Wind in the Willows. He retires from the Bank of England because of poor health.1908 The Wind in the Willows is published. The narrative marks a significant change in Grahame’s style and perspective; readers embrace it after a slow debut on the market. The novel represents Grahame’s last major literary effort.1910 E. M. Forster’s Howards End is published.1914 James Joyce’s Dubliners is published. World War I begins.1915 Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier is published.1916 The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children is published; it is compiled by Grahame and contains a preface by him.1917 T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations is published.1920 After suffering emotional stress at school because of his partial blindness, Alastair is found dead after being run over by a train; his parents view the death as accidental, although signs point to a suicide. By this point, Grahame and his wife have grown emotionally distant from one another and isolated from their friends. They will spend several years abroad, mainly in Italy, to distract them from their grief over their son’s death. Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence is published.1922 Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses are published.1924 The Grahames return to England and settle in Pangbourne, Berkshire.1926 Grahame’s last work appears—the introduction to Seventy Years a Showman, by George Sanger.1927 Virginia Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse is published.1929 A. A. Milne adapts The Wind in the Willows for the stage, as Toad of Toad Hall.1932 Grahame dies in Pangbourne on July 6.