Lark Rise to Candleford: A Trilogy

Flora Thompson was born in 1876 at Juniper Hill, a hamlet on the Oxfordshire-Northamptonshire border, described in Lark Rise. Her parents were humble and hard-working, but her mother was endowed with uncommon wisdom. From her and the little school which she left at fourteen she acquired the grounding for an education that was to come later. As a small child she used to carry the letters in a locked leather bag to the big house nearby, and so began her long connection with the Post Office. After leaving school she was sent as assistant to the village postmistress, who also kept the smithy, and who appears prominently in Candleford Green as Miss Lane. Flora Thompson married young a husband who later became a postmaster, and his work took them to Bournemouth. There 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. She started to write, and her first book was a collection of poems, Bog Myrtle and Peat. But it was her three autobiographical volumes that brought her fame: Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943), re-issued in one volume as Lark Rise to Candleford (1945). (Candleford is Buckingham.) In this trilogy is preserved a picture of rural life of the 1870s and 1880s, which has perhaps never been more enchantingly and truthfully portrayed. A fourth volume, Still Glides the Stream, came out in 1948. In her last years, Flora Thompson led a retired life, devoting herself to writing. She died at Brixham, Devon, on 21 May 1947. Read more