Flora Thompson
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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 at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Flora was educated at Cottisford and worked in Post Offices in south-east England until marrying John William Thompson in 1903, with whom she had two sons (the younger, Peter, later lost at sea in 1941) and a daughter.
After winning an essay competition in 1911, she 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 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.
Contents |
[edit] Bibliography
[edit] Verse
- Bog Myrtle and Peat 1921
[edit] 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)
[edit] Nature articles
- The Peverel Papers 1986 (published posthumously)
