Flora Thompson, Author of Lark Rise to Candleford
By Elodie Barnes | On September 7, 2024 | Updated September 8, 2024 | Comments (0)
Flora Thompson (December 5, 1876 – May 21, 1947), was an English novelist and poet, best known for her semi-autobiographical trilogy Lark Rise to Candleford.
The commercial and critical success of the books — Lark Rise, Over to Candleford, and Candleford Green — is such that they have never been out of print, and were adapted by the BBC for a four-season series in 2008.
Early life: The origins of Candleford
Flora Jane Timms was born in the rural hamlet of Juniper Hill, near Brackley, Oxfordshire. Her father, Albert, was a stonemason, whose ambitions to become a sculptor had been thwarted by his drinking and gambling.
Flora later remembered him as “a terrible spendthrift … he never seemed to grasp the fact that he was responsible for our upbringing … He had all of the bad qualities of genius and a few of the good ones.”
Her mother, Emma, had gone into service at an early age and had worked as a nursemaid before she married Albert. She gave birth to ten children between 1875 and 1898, but only six survived beyond the age of three. Despite her challenging life, Emma was a talented storyteller and delighted in creating imaginary worlds for her children through songs, games, and stories.
When Flora was growing up, Juniper Hill was barely touched by the Industrial Revolution that was sweeping across England. It was still a place where farm laborers earned a subsistence wage, and where women still drew water from a communal well.
Later, in the first of her famous trilogy, Lark Rise, Flora described it as “bare, brown, and windswept for eight months out of the twelve … only for a few weeks in later summer had the landscape real beauty.”
Reading, writing, and the post office
Flora attended school in Cottisford, a mile-and-a-half walk away from Juniper Hill. On those walks, she developed an intimate knowledge of the natural world that surrounded her, which she would later use in her writing. She left school at age twelve, like the other children in the hamlet, expected to go into service.
Her mother assumed that Flora would become a nursemaid like herself and was quietly disappointed when Flora showed no interest in babies. Instead, she preferred to read and write.
Flora left home at age fourteen to work in the Post Office in nearby Fringford, where her duties included selling stamps, working the new telegraph machine, and sorting letters.
Despite the lack of formal education, writing was already central to her life. Later, she would say that she “could not remember the time when [she] did not wish or mean to write,” and that she “never left off writing essays for the pleasure of writing.” She was also a voracious reader, and while lodging in Fringford took out a library ticket at the Mechanics Institute in a nearby town and read her way through Austen, Trollope, Scott, and Dickens.
In 1898 Flora left Fringford to work at the post office in Grayshott, Hampshire, where she served some of the well-known literary figures of the time who lived in the area, including George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Conan Doyle. Overawed by their celebrity, she nearly abandoned her own writing. It was likely here that she met her future husband, John William Thompson, a post office clerk and telegraphist from Aldershott (also in Hampshire).
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Marriage (and writing in secret)
By 1902 Flora was working at the post office in Twickenham. She married John Thompson on January 7, 1903, at the local St Mary’s Church. The couple then moved to Winton on the outskirts of Bournemouth, where two of their three children (Basil and Winifred) were born.
There they stayed there until 1916 when John became Postmaster at Liphook in Hampshire. Their third child, Peter, was born there as well, when Flora was forty-one. Another move followed in 1928, to Dartmouth in Devon, where the family settled.
Flora realized that her husband’s family did not approve of her “cottage origins” and regarded her passion for reading and writing as a waste of time. John did not encourage her writing either, so when the children were past infancy, she took to writing in secret.
Nature writing, literary essays, and poetry
In 1911, Flora had her first writing success when her essay on Jane Austen won a women’s newspaper competition. She subsequently sent the same newspaper another article and a short story, both of which were accepted and for which she received payment.
This seemed to precipitate a change of heart by her husband: so long as her writing paid and didn’t interfere with her responsibilities at home, then it could be tolerated.
She went on to write several short stories and newspaper articles, and when she was living in Liphook contributed two long series of articles to the Catholic Fireside magazine. One of these comprised literary essays, and the other consisted of nature writing.
Both series came from her own enthusiasm and dedication: she was a self-taught naturalist from childhood, and her literary essays were also the result of her own private study, carried out mainly in the newly established free public library system. These nature articles later went on to be collected in Margaret Lane’s A Country Calendar (1979) and in Julian Shuckburgh’s The Peverel Papers (1986).
Flora’s true real ambition was to be a poet. She lacked confidence — partly, perhaps, because of her childhood poverty and lack of formal education. She later said, “To be born in poverty is a terrible handicap to a writer. I often say to myself that it has taken one lifetime for me to prepare to make a start. If human life lasted two hundred years, I might hope to accomplish something.”
She was encouraged by Ronald Campbell Macfie, a Scottish physician and poet who had admired her writing in The Literary Monthly. This was an important friendship — the only real literary friendship she ever had — and it resulted in her first published book, a collection of poems titled Bog Myrtle and Peat, in 1921.
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Lark Rise to Candleford
Flora continued to write through the family’s move to Dartmouth. From 1925 until the outbreak of war in 1939 she ran a mail-based writing club called the Peverel Society, in which members shared their own work and critiqued the work of others.
It wasn’t until 1935 that she began to write about her Oxfordshire childhood — a vanishing world of rural and agricultural traditions — with the intention of giving “a true picture of the people and time … to describe things exactly as they were, without sentimentalizing or dramatizing.”
She sent the result to Oxford University Press, who accepted it for publication. Lark Rise was published in 1939, Over to Candleford in 1941, and Candleford Green in 1942. They were first issued together as a trilogy in 1945 under the title Lark Rise to Candleford.
The books tell the lightly fictionalized story of three closely-related Oxfordshire communities — a hamlet, a nearby village, and a small market town (based on Juniper Hill, Cottisford and Fringford) — and have often been used as sources for the social history of the period. Gillian Lindsay has written that “Few works better or more elegantly capture the decay of Victorian agrarian England.”
This success came relatively late in Flora’s life — she was by then in her sixties, and she claimed that by that point she was “too old to care much for the bubble reputation.” She had never been a part of any literary circles, preferring to keep to the fringes, and was surprised at how popular the trilogy was when so much of her writing had long been ignored.
She continued to write, although no further books were published until after her death. Heatherley, an account of her time in Grayshott and seen as a sequel to Lark Rise to Candleford, was unpublished until Margaret Lane included it in A Country Calendar. Her final book, Still Glides the Stream, was published after her death in 1948.
Her later work never achieved the popularity of Lark Rise to Candleford. The trilogy has never been out of print and has been adapted for both stage and television: two musicals based on the books, Lark Rise and Candleford, were performed at London’s National Theatre in 1978 and 1979, and a four-season series was produced by the BBC starting in 2008.
Last years
In 1940, Flora’s husband John retired from the post office, and the couple moved to a cottage in Brixham, Devon. By this time their oldest son Basil had left England for Australia, while their daughter Winifred was a nurse in Bristol. Their youngest son Peter was killed in 1941 while serving in the merchant navy, when his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic.
Flora never recovered from the loss of her son. She died of a heart attack at home in 1947, and her ashes are buried at the Longcross cemetery, Dartford, Devon.
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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at Elodie Rose Barnes.
More about Flora Thompson
Major Works
Poetry
- Bog Myrtle and Peat (1921)
Novels
- Lark Rise (1939)
- Over to Candleford (1941)
- Candleford Green (1943)
- Lark Rise to Candleford (1945 — the three novels published as a trilogy)
- Still Glides the Stream (1948, posthumous)
- Heatherley (1944, posthumous)
Nature writing
- The Peverel Papers (abridged,1986; complete, 2008)
Biography
Dreams of the Good Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of
Lark Rise to Candleford by Richard Mabey (2015)
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