| Flora Jane Thompson | |
|---|---|
| Born | Flora Jane Timms 5 December 1876 Juniper Hill, Oxfordshire, England |
| Died | 21 May 1947 (aged 70) Brixham, Devon, England |
| Resting place | Longcross Cemetery, Dartmouth, Devon, England |
| Employer | Post Office |
| Known for | Author and poet |
| Notable works | Lark Rise to Candleford |
| Spouse | John William Thompson |
| Children | 2 sons and a daughter |
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.
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She was born in Juniper Hill in northeast 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.[1] Flora was educated at the parish school in Cottisford.
Flora worked in various post offices in southern England. The first of these was Fringford, a village about 4 miles (6.4 km) northeast of Bicester. Flora started work here in 1891, as assistant to the postmistress, Mrs. Kezia Whitton.[2][3] Among other post offices where Flora worked was that at Grayshott in Hampshire and Yateley in Hampshire, and she later moved to Bournemouth. In 1903 she married John William Thompson at Twickenham Parish Church,[4] with whom she had a daughter, Winifred Grace (1903) and two sons, Henry Basil (1909) and Peter Redmond (1918)[5] (later lost at sea in 1941).
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.
The death of her son during the Second World War affected her deeply and overshadowed the final years of her life.[7] Flora Thompson died in 1947 of a heart attack[4] in Brixham, Devon and is buried at Longcross Cemetery, Dartmouth, Devon. In 1948, her final work, Still Glides the Stream, was published posthumously.[8]