Lark Rise to Candleford

Flora Jane Thompson (5 December 1876 – 21 May 1947) was an English novelist and poet famous for her semi-autobiographical trilogy about the English countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford.

Flora benefited from good access to books when the public library opened in Winton, in 1907. Not long after, in 1911, she won an essay competition in The Ladies Companion for a 300-word essay about Jane Austen.[6] She later wrote extensively, publishing short stories and magazine and newspaper articles. She was a keen self-taught naturalist and many of her nature articles were anthologised in 1986.

Her most famous works are the Lark Rise to Candleford trilogy, which she sent as essays to Oxford University Press in 1938 and which were published soon after. She wrote a sequel Heatherley which was published posthumously. The books are a fictionalised, if autobiographical, social history of rural English life in the late 19th and early 20th century and are now considered minor classics

.

Flora Jane Thompson (nee Timms) was born in 1876 at Juniper Hill, a hamlet near the borders of Oxfordshire and Northamptonshire.  After leaving school she was sent as assistant to the postmistress (who also kept the forge) at a town eight miles away, and was for some time employed to carry the letters in a locked leather bag to the big house near by.  So began her long connection with the Post Office.  She married young and her husband later became a postmaster.  His work took them to Bournemouth, where she obtained from the public library the Greek and Roman classics in translation, as well as Ibsen and the English poets, novelists and critics - especially Shaw and Yeats.  Her first book was a collection of poems, Bog Myrtle and Peat.  However, she is best remembered for three autobiographical volumes: Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941) and Candleford Green (1943), reissued in one volume as Lark Rise to Candleford (1945).  A fourth volume, Still Glides the Stream, was published posthumously in 1948.  Flora Thompson died at Brixham, Devon on 21 May 1947.