Country girl who penned a classic

 
27 February 2014

Dreams of the Good Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of Lark Rise to Candleford by Richard Mabey (Allen Lane, £16.99)

Flora Thompson is remembered for just one book, her trilogy about life in the Victorian countryside, Lark Rise to Candleford, published during the Second World War and first gathered under that title in 1945, not long before her death aged 70.

Between 2008 and 2011 the books were freely adapted into a BBC costume drama, taking over the Sunday cosy slot from Cranford before eventually ceding it to Call the Midwife, running for four series and attracting audiences averaging seven million. Penguin Classics reissued Lark Rise in 2008 with a new introduction by Richard Mabey and here he has extended it into a concise biography of Thompson, aiming to correct the myth that she was any kind of naïve “hedge-scribe”, showing her instead as “a self-taught writer who broke through the early-20th century’s considerable barriers for creative women”, particularly those from the working class.

Flora Timms was born in 1876 in the impoverished hamlet of Juniper Hill in Oxfordshire, the daughter of a builder’s labourer, one of 10 children, four of whom died in infancy. The life she knew as a child in this village is immortalised in Lark Rise and nowhere else — a difficulty for Mabey, since his details are hers and all familiar.

Flora was an avid reader and when she left school at 14, instead of going into service she found a job in the post office at Fringford three miles away. She never went back, returning to Juniper Hill only once in the rest of her life. Aged 20 she moved to a post office in Surrey; aged 26 she married a dull-seeming post office clerk called John Thompson, moving with him to Bournemouth, then Liphook and ultimately Dartmouth, as he was promoted.

Flora Thompson’s first published work was a 300-word essay about Jane Austen, which won a competition in The Lady’s Companion when she was 34 and a mother-of-two. She went on to submit stories to the magazine — and then, for a number of years, published “Out of Doors” columns, combining nature notes with fantasy about the life she was leading.

Noticing the positive reaction she had from readers whenever she wrote of her childhood, in 1935 she began the pieces about her life of 50 years before that became Lark Rise, neither quite memoir nor fiction. Turning 60, she had at last found her true vein, a different fluency and a new authority.

Mabey notes that it is her invention of a child alter-ego “Laura”, while never speaking in the first person singular as a present narrator, that helps give the book such presence — but it is also her use of tense, always iterative, as though this time would go on forever, that is so seductive still.

With few other sources than her own published writing to draw on, Mabey honourably admits he still finds Flora Thompson herself “strangely impenetrable”. But Lark Rise is the opposite: luminous. Or, as he puts it, fabulous.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £13.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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