Flora Thompson

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".

She was born in Juniper Hill in north-east Oxfordshire, the eldest of six children of Albert and Emma Timms, a stonemason and nursemaid respectively. Her favourite brother, Edwin, was killed near Ypres in 1916. Flora was educated in Cottisford and worked in various post offices in southern England. The first of these was Fringford, a village about four miles north-east of Bicester. Flora started work here in 1891, as assistant to the postmistress, Mrs. Kezia Whitton. [ "Flora Thompson, the story of the 'Lark Rise' writer", by Gillian Lindsay, 2007, ISBN 978-1873855-53-9 ] [1881 census, parish of Fringford] Among other post offices where Flora worked was that at Grayshott, in Hampshire, and she later moved to Bournemouth. In 1903 she married John William Thompson, with whom she had two sons (the younger, Peter, later lost at sea in 1941) and a daughter.

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 on Jane Austen. [ [http://www.wintonforum.co.uk/flora.html Winton Community Forum - Flora Thompson's years in Winton ] ] 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 Thompson died in 1947 in Brixham, Devon and is buried at Longcross Cemetery, Dartmouth, Devon.

Bibliography

Verse

*"Bog Myrtle and Peat" (1921)

Novels

*"Lark Rise" (1939)
*"Over to Candleford" (1941)
*"Candleford Green" (1943)
*"Lark Rise to Candleford" (1945, above three novels published as a trilogy)
*"Still Glides the Stream" (1948, published posthumously)
*"Heatherley" (sequel to Lark Rise to Candleford written c.1944 - published posthumously first in A Country Calendar 1979 along with some Peverel Papers and some poems; then as single volume 1998)
*"Gates of Eden" (serialised in The Peverel Monthly edited by Flora in the late 1920s but never published as a separate volume)

Nature articles

*"The Peverel Papers" (1986, published posthumously)

References

External links

* [http://www.johnowensmith.co.uk/flora/ Flora Thompson website]
* [http://larkrisetocandleford.tripod.com Lark Rise to Candleford website]